Finding SiCortex's sweet spot

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Jon Van writes at the Chicago Tribune this week about Purdue’s adventures with its new SiCortex

Purdue University this summer installed a new kind of supercomputer made by SiCortex of Boston that uses 40 times less power than a traditional supercomputer does. Argonne National Laboratory also has one.

Gerry McCartney, Purdue’s CIO, says the university expects to see a reduction of 75-80 percent on the costs of energy for this machine (I’m not sure what this is a reduction from…perhaps their previous super?).

Van goes on to share more about Purdue’s use of the machine

But scaling back the power means the green computer cannot do everything a traditional supermachine can, McCartney said, so researchers are working to find out what kinds of computational tasks it does best.