ACADEMIA

System to Support Next-Generation Computer Science Curriculum: SiCortex announced today that the first SC072 Catapult personal cluster was shipped to Professors Gyan Bhanot and Manish Parashar at Rutgers University. The 72-processor deskside unit, which was named the industry's sexiest product by ZDnet at the Supercomputing 07 conference in November, will be used to develop a new computer science and engineering course at Rutgers, to develop novel algorithms to study mitochondrial and viral evolution, and to find useful markers for the treatment of cancer. "Progress in Distributed High Performance Computing requires an improvement of three elements of the architecture: CPU speed, memory access and network performance, while balancing total cost of ownership, which includes price and power requirements." said Professor Bhanot. "The design point of the SC072 seems to be an unusually promising balance of these factors for a range of applications. We will test its performance on applications in many different fields including evolutionary population genetics, bioinformatics, analysis of networks and the design of efficient parallel algorithms and data layouts. Our students cannot wait to get their hands on it." In fact, students in Prof. Parashar's spring 2008 course on parallel computing will begin using the system immediately. "Teaching modern computer science on single processor computers is like teaching thermodynamics with one molecule," said Professor Parashar. "It does not make sense. We are hoping that our success with the new SC072 will lead to a lab full of SC072's." Priced at under $15,000, the SC072 offers a unique starting point for parallel processing education. With 72 full 64-bit Linux processors, it allows serious exploration of parallel algorithms and approaches, draws less than 200 watts of power and fits in standard PC chassis. This eliminates the heat and fan noise issues that have previously made it impossible to put such a large cluster in a deskside environment. “The development of applications for high processor count computers has been hampered by the need to have access to these computers,” said SiCortex CEO Dr. John Mucci. “We designed the SC072 to simplify the development process, and accelerate the growth of high performance computing applications. The enthusiastic response from Professors Bhanot and Parashar reflects what we are hearing from many in the industry, and we are grateful for their support.”