It's time for startup founders to think bigger

Peter Thiel’s Breakout Labs is one of the most explicit examples of this. As we reported at the program’s launch last month, Breakout Labs will aim to fund nascent innovation proposals - opportunities that are too early stage or radical to attract dollars from VCs or government grants. Deep down, Thiel, who recently told the New Yorker that he doesn’t consider the iPhone to be a major technological breakthrough, is saying: Enough with the toys and games. It’s time for us to make something big.

Matter of fact complex — think aeronautics

If you want to build something as a matter of fact complex — think aeronautics, new pharmaceutical drugs, medical devices, jet engines, and the like — you need high-performance computing. HPC solves advanced computational and scientific problems by using a massive amount of computing power to solve very complicated problems that involve a lot of moving parts.

But last year, Amazon started offering HPC as a service with “Cluster Compute,” making high-performance computing available in the same way that EC2 made regular servers available in the cloud. Previously this month, Amazon souped up its Cluster Compute offering significantly — now, Amazon’s HPC-as-a-service offering provides access to one of the world’s top 500 supercomputers for around $1,000 per hour. In the meantime, tools just as CUDA and OpenCL give programmers the ability to harness massive numbers of compute cores without having to learn a special programming language.

The help of HPC

Once challenging research problems have been mastered with the help of HPC, some of the solutions will need to be prototyped and put into physical production. This is on the whole a very labor- and cost-intensive process, which is a big reason why many startups prefer to stay in the virtual realm. However the emergence of viable 3D printing research is on the cusp of changing that — making it cheaper and easier than ever previously to make a physical prototype of a new design.