In the News

As the red, white, and black uniforms of the MIT Cycling Team bobbed up and down before me early this afternoon, I couldn’t help thinking: human abacus. Okay, the logic might be twisted (most folks here at Xconomy figure that’s a given when I start writing), but there is method to my madness. The cyclists, 10 of them, had gathered in the lobby of MIT’s Stata Center specifically to do some human-powered computing. Their bikes were hooked up to generators, and as the team members pedaled, they produced direct current energy. The generators, in turn, were connected to a converter that transformed that energy to alternating current, which was used to power a couple of small SiCortex supercomputers, which were running an application that simulated a fusion reaction.

The SiCortex 5832 (bottom left and right) is a 5-teraflop single-unit supercomputer. It uses low-power, custom 64-bit MIPS-processor packages (top right), which are basically entire computers on a single chip.

Here’s one computer that looks like it belongs on the bridge of a starship: the SiCortex SC5832. It’s this year’s winner of the soon-to-be-coveted Dev Connection “Sexiest in show” award for SC07. And yes those lights do sweep across the front like a Cylon, or the star car in Knight Rider. The front even lifts up like the hood of a hot rod for easy access.

People always want more. That is a truism, but it is particularly true in the field of computing: more memory, more processing power, more speed, more everything. It is, perhaps, a neat linguistic coincidence that the rate at which this moreness is delivered is commonly known as Moore's law. And that is exactly what SiCortex and Scalable Servers Corporation, two small American firms, plan to do. At the Supercomputing 07 conference in Reno, Nevada, this week, they unveiled their wares. Each has packaged something like a server cluster into a single box, to produce what each hopes will be a commercially viable desktop supercomputer.

On Monday, the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Argonne National Laboratory became the proud owners of the first SiCortex SC5832 system deployed in the field. Introduced in November 2006, the SC5832, along with its smaller sibling, the SC648, represent a new approach to high performance computing. The SiCortex machines have garnered a good deal of critical acclaim over the past year, but this will be the first time the community will be able to see one operate with real applications. The 5.8 teraflop machine will be operated by Argonne's Mathematics and Computer Science (MCS) Division to further its mission in researching and developing software for high performance computing architectures.