Supercomputer Beats Heat Without Special Cooling

In fact, a SiCortex supercomputer can plug into a standard wall outlet and be sufficiently cooled by a typical window air conditioner, according to the company.

SiCortex unveiled its first two ultra-low-power, high-performance Linux machines Wednesday and said it's talking with customers to install beta configurations in the spring. The company is backed by $42 million in venture capital financing.

SiCortex machines have been designed to be up and running at customer sites in just one day. "It'll take longer to uncrate them than to install them," a company spokesman says.

The first two SiCortex models are based on a-cluster-on-a-chip featuring six 64-bit processor cores. The microprocessor design was licensed from MIPS Technologies. An entire cluster node, including DDR-2 memory, draws 15 watts of power, much less than the 250 watts typically used in existing cluster nodes. Each cluster node contains multiple memory controllers, a high-performance cluster interconnect, and a PCIexpress connection to storage and internetworking.

"The conventional approach to higher performance has been to use increasing numbers of merchant chips, inevitably leading to more heat-imposed bottlenecks," said John Mucci, SiCortex CEO, in a statement. "Starting with a clean sheet of silicon, we've placed all of the essential elements of a node on a chip and demonstrated that low power equals higher performance."

The high-end machine, the SC5832, has 5,832 processors, eight terabytes of memory, and 2.1 terabits per second of I/O capacity. It provides 58 teraflops of 64-bit floating point performance. The SC5832 can fit in a rack less than six feet tall. The smaller machine, the SC648, fits in less than half of a single standard 19-inch rack. It features 864 gigabytes of memory with 240 gigabits per second of I/O capacity.

The smaller machine is expected to be priced at about $200,000; the larger configuration will likely sport a $1.5 million pricetag.

SiCortex is located in Maynard, Mass., in the former headquarters of Digital Equipment Corp. While the firm's founding executives and designers have held positions far and wide in recent years, they worked at Digital for several years so their startup represents a homecoming of sorts.

CEO Mucci, who held several key executive positions at Thinking Machines, worked on Digital's VAX machine when it moved into the scientific computing field. Jud Leonard, SiCortex's chief technology officer, was a key software developer on several Digital models. Bob Supnik, VP of engineering, led microprocessor development of Digital's workhorse VAX machines.

SiCortex will exhibit at next week's SC '06 supercomputing show in Tampa, FL.