High-performance computing platform Rescale raises $50 mln

Feb 2 (Reuters) - Rescale, a platform that helps researchers access high performance computing for complex calculations, said on Tuesday it raised $50 million from investors including chip firm NVIDIA Corp, Microsoft Corp's venture fund M12, and Korea's Samsung Catalyst Fund.

The latest round brings the total funding to over $100 million. The company declined to disclose its latest valuation.

Rescale Chief Executive Joris Poort co-founded the company nine years ago after facing challenges working out calculations for optimizing wing designs for Boeing's 787 Dreamliner plane, he said in an interview.

The computing power required was so big he had to wait until the weekend when no one was working and link up several data centers at the company to do the work, he said.

But as data centers shift to the cloud, much of the heavy computing can be done by linking up different data centers through the cloud. Rescale provides the platform to do that while also using physical data centers at researchers' own companies, said Poort.

Corporate research and development scientists and engineers are Rescale's target market, Poort said. (Reporting by Jane Lanhee Lee; Editing by Richard Chang)