November 14th, 2007
SiCortex wins Dev Connection "Sexiest in show" award
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:
Under the hood you’ll find a cluster of 972 nodes, each having six processors, for a total of 5,832 processors. Each processor draws a paltry 600 milliwatts of juice. The chassis can hold up to 8 TB of main memory, and the theoretical peak performance is 5.8 TFlops.
Even with all that power and beauty, the whole cabinet only draws 18 kilowatts of electricity. Nodes communicate directly over a passive copper backplane. It’s air cooled, and each node runs a fairly standard Linux kernel. It comes pre-installed with a full suite of development software including MPI, TAU, Vampir, TotalView, and more. To run an existing Fortran, C, or C++ MPI application, says the company, just type “make”.
KITT would be jealous.
Ed Burnette is a professional developer and author of several articles and books about computing including Hello, Android: Introducing Google's Mobile Development Platform, 2nd Edition. For disclosure of Ed's industry affiliations, click here or to view his full profile click here.
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| 11/14/07
