APPLICATIONS

Provides powerful, easy-to-use development environment for parallel programming; harnesses 72 processors using less electricity than a single PC: SiCortex today announced the availability of its next generation personal development system, the SC072-PDS (PDS). Packaged with Linux, the operating system of choice for HPC, the PDS combines the at-the-desk accessibility and low cooling requirements of a PC with the speed and power of high-productivity computing. The PDS is a fully-loaded development system in a single deskside cabinet that plugs into a standard office electrical outlet. With unique energy efficiency, the PDS is priced lower than any competing alternative, both from a purchase price basis and in terms of total cost of ownership. "SiCortex has released the world's greenest development computer, which also happens to be the world's most compact parallel processing system," said Christopher Stone, president and CEO of SiCortex. "Just unpack, plug in, turn on - and start working. There's nothing else like it on the market. Competitor offerings are simply PCs masquerading as HPCs." Delivering even higher performance than the original SC072 Catapult announced in March 2008, the PDS is easy to install and use, enabling immediate program creation through a simplified, intuitive development environment. Simply plug the system in and start developing, distributing and running multiple applications across the system's 72 tightly interconnected processors. Applications can also be scaled to run on thousands of processors available in SiCortex's departmental or data center computers with comparably impressive space- and power-efficient footprints, or easily migrated to data center supercomputers. "Our whisper-quiet, energy-efficient SC072-PDS costs less than a one blade Cray CX-1, yet has more peak GFLops performance and three times the memory bandwidth," said Rich Dischler, director of technical marketing at SiCortex. With a low latency, high bandwidth interconnect fabric to ensure optimal communication between nodes, the SiCortex development and processing environment is far superior to the average x86 chip set, board and port configuration competitors cluster together that are generally too unwieldy, noisy and hot for a standard work environment. The SiCortex software environment provides a powerful and fully integrated set of tools to support applications, combining maximum user-level performance with minimum system management overhead to allow for the efficient development-to-production process of parallel code sets. The company leverages Open Source software to promote the learning and experimentation that is the backbone of HPC-fueled innovation. The system is bundled with the leading standard Linux utilities (including bash, CVS, Emacs, GNU make, openSSH, tcsh, and vim) that are automatically updated. "The SC072-PDS is a wonderful platform for scalable application and algorithm development," said Jack Dongarra, a University Distinguished Professor in electrical engineering and computer science department at the University of Tennessee. "By building a truly balanced architecture where the interconnect, memory bandwidth and compute capacity all play equal roles, the PDS represents the next step in bringing high core count computing to the masses. We can now develop and analyze algorithms right on the desktop with real confidence that they will scale out to our petascale platforms at Oak Ridge National Labs and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. This type of functionality is not yet available from other vendors; the closest offerings come with higher price tags and place significantly higher demands on power, space and cooling."