News Article

Optimizing the resources at the heart of every cloud computation.
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Featured firm in this article: Sync Computing Corp of Cambridge, MA



The allure of an infinite pool of computing resources, perpetually on-call and ready to deploy with a few mouse clicks and a credit card, pulls at nearly every modern organization today. The cloud is responsible for an ever-increasing percentage of the world's computing workloads. At the same time, the computing demands for fundamental scientific discoveries, web-scale data analytics, and machine learning have outpaced the capabilities of individual computers, requiring resources at a scale only available in the cloud.

But the cloud ecosystem -- a $300 billion sector -- is facing a wall of diminishing returns leading to exploding cloud costs for businesses. As more companies continue to adopt the cloud to handle their ever growing data, it is no surprise that cloud costs are their primary concern. Simply throwing more computers at a problem only goes so far. As these critical workloads continue to grow, performance hinges less on the capabilities of the individual chips being used, and ever more on the orchestration of thousands of those chips working in concert.

Sync Computing, a startup born out of MIT Lincoln Laboratory, is tackling this fundamental challenge by building an Optimization Engine for the cloud. The company, founded by Jeff Chou and Suraj Bramhavar, got its start by inventing a radically new circuit architecture for solving combinatorial optimization problems.

These types of problems form the bedrock of many logistics and scheduling challenges faced when moving our physical goods around the world, and are notoriously difficult because of the sheer number of possibilities that must be sifted through to determine an optimal solution. The Sync team quickly realized that this problem can also be found in the movement of our 'digital' goods, forming the core of every distributed computing system in existence today.

Chou and Bramhavar are no strangers to distributed computing, having spent much of their careers working on high speed interconnects, a key bottleneck for modern computing infrastructure. It was their work at the Lincoln Lab that allowed them to approach the distributed computing problem with an entirely new perspective.

The Sync Optimization Engine will serve as the heart of tomorrow's cloud environment, quietly shuttling the right information to the right processor at the right time, and unleashing the untapped potential of millions of computers sitting in data centers around the world.

The result? Dramatically more efficient computing for everyone. More performance. Lower costs. And without the need to replace today's processors, which are themselves reaching their physical limits. In an era where the demand for computing power continues to increase with no end in sight, Sync Computing is poised to meet the need by unlocking the true potential of the cloud.