Start-up SiCortex puts green twist on high-performance computing

SiCortex aims for better performance, fewer watts

The supercomputing world is one of giant government labs, big machines and speeds measured in hundreds of trillions of calculations per second. But a new company called SiCortex is trying to bring the benefits of high-performance computing to smaller enterprises and research groups, particularly those worried about the rising cost of electricity.

Competing against the likes of Dell, HP and IBM, SiCortex officials hope their approach combining high-performance computing with energy-efficient design is disruptive enough to shake up what they believe has become a stagnant market.

"This is a systems company, and it's been a long time since anybody actually built and deployed a systems company," says chief engineer and co-founder Matt Reilly.

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The supercomputing world is one of giant government labs, big machines and speeds measured in hundreds of trillions of calculations per second. But a new company called SiCortex is trying to bring the benefits of high-performance computing to smaller enterprises and research groups, particularly those worried about the rising cost of electricity.

Competing against the likes of Dell, HP and IBM, SiCortex officials hope their approach combining high-performance computing with energy-efficient design is disruptive enough to shake up what they believe has become a stagnant market.

"This is a systems company, and it's been a long time since anybody actually built and deployed a systems company," says chief engineer and co-founder Matt Reilly.

SiCortex has 84 employees and is headed up by CEO Chris Stone, a former Novell executive responsible for engineering and product management from 2002 to 2004.

Also among its top executives is co-founder and chief architect Jud Leonard, who previously co-founded Agile Systems and TLW. Both Leonard and Reilly worked at Digital Equipment Corporation, while Reilly is also a veteran of Compaq and Intel.

Click to see: Photo of Jud Leonard

SiCortex shipped its first beta machine in July 2007 and went into production early in 2008.

In an attempt to convince customers that its systems really are unusually efficient, SiCortex developed a benchmark called the Green Computing Performance Index, which measures performance per kilowatt and gives SiCortex a score about 70% better than the IBM Blue Gene/P, one of the most advanced supercomputers in the world.

"We chose a processor whose design supported power savings in ways that were important to us," Leonard says. "We watched where power was being spent and worked very hard to control it. … It's a matter of tackling it up and down the line. That's how you get order-of-magnitude savings, instead of 15% savings."

SiCortex sells three machines: a desktop computer with 72 processors, a mid-range system with 1,458 processors, and the biggest of all, a 5,832-processor system that costs more than $1 million and delivers speeds of eight teraflops, which means it can perform 8 trillion calculations per second. The fastest supercomputer in the world, an IBM machine based at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, performs more than 1,000 trillion calculations per second.

But SiCortex isn't aiming to build the fastest supercomputer in the world, or even the most reliable. The markets the company targets — small enterprises, collaborative groups, university departments and divisions within national labs — won't spend enough to get five nines of availability, says SiCortex CTO John Goodhue.

For its processors, SiCortex purchased intellectual property from several sources including the company MIPS Technologies,  and modified the design to suit its own needs. The Linux-based machines use a network of Leonard's design.

"In an Ethernet or Infiniband environment, you have processing nodes and you have separate switches. That's called an indirect network," Leonard says. "Ours is a direct network in which each component of the system includes a small portion of the switch fabric and you wire them together so you don't need a separate component to do the fabric switching."