SiCortex was a

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

manufacturer founded in 2003 and headquartered in Clock Tower Place,

Maynard, Massachusetts Maynard is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. The town is located 22 miles west of Boston, in the MetroWest and Greater Boston region of Massachusetts and borders Acton, Concord, Stow and Sudbury. The town's population w ...

. On 27 May 2009, ''HPCwire'' reported that the company had shut down its operations, laid off most of its staff, and is seeking a buyer for its assets. ''

The Register ''The Register'' is a British technology news website co-founded in 1994 by Mike Magee, John Lettice and Ross Alderson. The online newspaper's masthead sublogo is "''Biting the hand that feeds IT''." Their primary focus is information tec ...

'' reported that Gerbsman Partners was hired to sell SiCortex's intellectual properties. While SiCortex had some sales, selling at least 75 prototype supercomputers to several large customers, the company had never produced an operating profit and ran out of venture capital. New funding could not be found. The company built and marketed a family of clusters of between 12 and 972 compute nodes, connected in a

Kautz graph The Kautz graph K_M^ is a directed graph of degree M and dimension N+ 1, which has (M +1)M^ vertices labeled by all possible strings s_0 \cdots s_N of length N + 1 which are composed of characters s_i chosen from an alphabet A containing M + 1 di ...

. The clusters are the SC5832, SC648 and SC072. It was reported that the company has been working on the next generation of clusters since March 2009, but development ceased when operations were closed. The SC5832 is a high-end model housed in a cabinet. It has 972 nodes, 5,832 cores and 972 to 7,776 GB of memory. It uses a diameter-6 Kautz graph for 2,916 links. The SC648 is a mid-range model housed in a standard 19-inch rack. Each rack may contain two systems. It has 108 nodes, 648 cores and 108 to 864 GB of memory. It uses a diameter-4 Kautz graph for 324 links. The SC072 is a desktop model for developing software. Each node is

system-on-chip A system on a chip or system-on-chip (SoC ; pl. ''SoCs'' ) is an integrated circuit that integrates most or all components of a computer or other electronic system. These components almost always include a central processing unit (CPU), memory ...

(SoC), codenamed ICE9,System Administration Guide
/ref> consisting of six cores that implement the

MIPS64 MIPS (Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipelined Stages) is a family of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architectures (ISA)Price, Charles (September 1995). ''MIPS IV Instruction Set'' (Revision 3.2), MIPS Technologies, ...

instruction set architecture In computer science, an instruction set architecture (ISA), also called computer architecture, is an abstract model of a computer. A device that executes instructions described by that ISA, such as a central processing unit (CPU), is called an ' ...

(ISA). Each core has a 32 KB instruction cache and a 32 KB data cache. The six cores have their own 256 KB L2 cache, which can be accessed by other cores. The MIPS cores execute instructions in-order and have a six-stage pipeline. They can issue and execute two instructions per cycle for peak double-precision (64-bit) performance of 1 GFLOPS at 500 MHz. This was later increased to 1.4 GFLOPS when the clock frequency of the SoC was increased to 700 MHz when the SoC was fabricated in a 90 nm process. The SoC contains two DDR2 memory controllers, each controlling a single DIMM. Each node can have 1 to 8 GB of memory. The SoC also implements a 8x PCI Express controller. The cluster interconnect is implemented by a DMA engine fabric switch. Each cluster interconnect provides a maximum bandwidth of 2 GB/s. Message passing, via

MPI MPI or Mpi may refer to: Science and technology Biology and medicine * Magnetic particle imaging, an emerging non-invasive tomographic technique * Myocardial perfusion imaging, a nuclear medicine procedure that illustrates the function of the hear ...

, is the presumptive programming model. SiCortex systems run a customized

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

distribution derived from

Gentoo Linux Gentoo Linux (pronounced ) is a Linux distribution built using the Portage package management system. Unlike a binary software distribution, the source code is compiled locally according to the user's preferences and is often optimized for the ...

Hardware Models

References

* https://web.archive.org/web/20090531211623/http://www.top500.org/2007_overview_recent_supercomputers/sicortex_sc_series * http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2009/01/04/through_ups_and_downs_creative_mill_grinds_on/ * http://www.bio-medicine.org/biology-news-1/Argonne-National-Lab-acquires-first-SiCortex-SC5832-824-1/ * Tally, Stev
"New green supercomputer powers up at Purdue"
* Morgan, Timothy Prickett (19 September 2008)
"SiCortex cranks clocks on mega MIPS machines"
* Vance, Ashlee (20 November 2006)
"Startup takes Reg's coveted 'Top FLOP' award"
''

''. * Morgan, Timothy Prickett (12 March 2009)
"Supercomputer niche chucks rocks at Nehalem"
''

''.

External links

Installation Photos @ Argonne National Laboratory

Signed PCB & Rhode Island Computer Museum
{{MIPS microprocessors Cluster computing MIPS architecture Parallel computing *Supercomputers