Boston-based Symmetric Computing was one of the sixteen MassChallenge winners this year — taking home $50,000. The company, operating out of the UMass Venture Development Center, is putting affordable supercomputers in the hands of the masses. Symmetric has built a shared-memory supercomputer – the Trio™ – and is prepping to go to market with it this January.
Supercomputers, those at the forefront of computing capacity and speed, are used for calculation-intensive tasks: things like quantum physics and molecular modeling. Before Symmetric’s breakthrough machine, similar supercomputers carried $1-$10MM price tags which made them rarely accessible to even universities, let alone smaller labs. According to Symmetric’s founder, Richard Andersen, the Trio is a tenth of the price and offers the same (if not better, if you ask some of their beta customers) computing.
“The idea was to empower a larger number of researchers to accelerate medicine,” Andersen explained. The Trio will enable what’s known as ‘departmental supercomputing,’ such as the sequencing of genomes to enable personalized cancer care locally. “And it’s not just for science and medicine. We’re looking at financial modeling, weather forecasting, and even film making.”
One of Symmetric’s first customers was actually UMass, and, over the last year, several dozen beta customers have also been using their machines. Almost all indicated they would purchase machines once it went to market, and a few have even already made upfront purchase commitments.
Andersen explained that while the architecture for the idea and patents around it have been around for some time, technology developments — like multicore processors – were not advancing as quickly as he initially thought. This timing resulted in the Trio taking about four years to develop. “It had been theorized,” Andersen explained, “but we were the ones that made it happen.” Andersen’s team plans to build supercomputers with double the processors and are also working on one that will have more than three times as many processors (the Trio has 96 processors). The company even has patent-pending technology for up to 2,000 processors.
In terms of how he’s getting the word out about the Trio, Andersen said most of the buzz has been passed by word of mouth in the science community to date. “LinkedIn is our friend,” Andersen said. “We go to conferences, too, and have a good team across mathematics and the sciences – not just computer science.” Andersen explained that this cross segment across the information and knowledge community on his team has been critical in identifying needs, segments and going to market.
Symmetric Computing is self-funded and in part by friends and associates. To learn more about their technology, please visit their website.
