HPCwire: Powered Down: SiCortex to Sell Off Assets of Company

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Features

May 27, 2009

Powered Down: SiCortex to Sell Off Assets of Company

by Addison Snell, Vice President and General Manager, Tabor Research

Following the sudden loss of venture capital funding, HPC system provider SiCortex shut down operations earlier today, according to a well-placed source within the company who wished not to be named. The majority of employees have been laid off, and the company will seek an immediate sale of its assets.

According to the source, the course of action was initiated when one of the five venture capital firms behind SiCortex pulled out because of a lack of available funds. The other four then followed suit.

The five firms that had funded SiCortex were Chevron Technology Ventures, Flagship Ventures, JK&B Capital, Polaris Venture Partners, and Prism VentureWorks. They had previously provided SiCortex with $42 million in funding, most recently in a Series B round in 2006. None of the five firms returned calls for comment.

These developments come at a time of rapid growth for SiCortex, despite the current economic conditions. The company announced record quarterly growth for Q1 2009, with the majority of its business coming from the relatively strong government sector.

According to Tabor Research, worldwide traditional HPC server revenue was $7.5 billion in 2008 and forecasted to fall to $7.0 billion for 2009, with a drop-off in academic endowment funding and lengthening sales cycles in commercial markets outweighing any gains in the government sector.

Since its inception in 2003, Massachusetts-based SiCortex has designed HPC systems with an emphasis on low power consumption. Its differentiated architecture helped turn SiCortex into a high-profile, second-tier HPC vendor. HPCwire named SiCortex an HPC Company to Watch in 2006 and recognized the company with its Editor's Choice Award for Most Innovative HPC Cluster Solution in 2007.

Despite recent growth, SiCortex had not yet become operationally profitable, so the loss of funding left its management no choice but to lay off employees and stop operations immediately. The company is presently maintaining a skeleton crew dedicated to the support of existing customers and to finding an immediate exit strategy.

Failing a "highly improbable" replacement of the lost venture capital, "we are looking at an as-is asset sale," said the source. SiCortex would potentially become the third HPC system provider sold in a span of one quarter. Rackable completed its acquisition and brand adoption of SGI earlier this month, and the sale of Sun Microsystems to Oracle is still pending closure.

The fate of SiCortex underscores the wide-ranging effects of a flagging economy, with venture capitalists also feeling the pinch. As more tech companies look for recession-resilient sectors within HPC, those that are venture-funded may find they are reliant on more than just their own growth.

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 2 discussion items posted.

SciCortex
Submitted by RobinH on 05/28/2009 - 6:09AM

Being non-x86 is going to be very very hard

Post #1

SiCortex
Submitted by drady on 05/28/2009 - 4:53PM

Being non-x86 was not the problem.

Post #2

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Top Headlines

Australia Commissions Cray Supercomputer

Mar 19 | OfficialWire | New super to support intelligence work Down Under. Read more...

Intel Partners See 'Easy' Upgrade Path With Xeon 5600 Chips

Mar 18 | ChannelWeb | Westmere parts already showing up in HPC machines. Read more...

AMD: OEMs primed for Opteron 6100s

Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...

Arrival of the Desktop Supercomputer

Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...

Scheduling HPC In The Cloud

Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html