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December 15, 2006
SiCortex Marches to A Different Drummer
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Last month at SC06, SiCortex, Inc. introduced its family of ultra low power high performance Linux systems, based on MIPS processor technology. Selected as one of five "HPC Companies to Watch in 2007" by HPCwire, SiCortex has developed a unique system architecture that it says represents a "sea change in cluster computing."
In this Q&A, the company's co-founders, John Mucci (CEO) and Jud Leonard (CTO), talk about the novel design of the SiCortex systems, how the design overcomes the limitations of conventional clusters, and how their offerings will fit into the HPC market.
HPCwire: How do you view the HPC landscape today?
Mucci: It is a very exciting time in high performance computing. At the very highest end, DARPA is accelerating the pace at which the very biggest systems are able to do new science. In the volume part of the market, clusters have spawned a stable Linux/MPI software model that means that existing codes are portable in ways they never were before.
And yet...
The number of organizations that are actually benefitting from HPC techniques of simulation is quite small compared to the number that could be benefitting. Proctor & Gamble has become a poster child for what happens when a previously HPC-phobic organization makes the transition. SiCortex started by asking:
"Given that the need for HPC is ubiquitous, why isn't HPC itself ubiquitous?"
As the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee has pointed out, many of the obstacles are operational: "the most serious technical problems in computational science lie in software, usability, and trained personnel." Mainstream users need a powerful but stable, compatible, and cost-effective solution. It needs to be powerful because these users cannot get bogged down in speed-hacking. It needs to be stable so they do not need a staff of sys admins just to keep the system up. It needs to be cost-effective to fit in existing budgets.
But most of all it needs to be software compatible so existing software just compiles, links and runs.
Just how powerful, stable, and cost-effective does it need to be? SiCortex research showed that ubiquity will require a teraflops or so of sustained applications performance, a single-vendor solution with a MTBF of a month or more, and a price -- purchase and three-year operation -- below $2 million. It was clear that conventional cluster thinking was standing in the way of these goals. SiCortex needed to take a very different path.
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