SiCortex today announced its newest deskside “personal development system” (72 core system targeted at developers of code for the machine’s bigger brothers). The PDS is evidently a brand change from Catapult they launched at SC last year.
Packaged with Linux, the operating system of choice for HPC, the PDS combines the at-the-desk accessibility and low cooling requirements of a PC with the speed and power of high-productivity computing. The PDS is a fully-loaded development system in a single deskside cabinet that plugs into a standard office electrical outlet. With unique energy efficiency, the PDS is priced lower than any competing alternative, both from a purchase price basis and in terms of total cost of ownership.
The hook on this announcement is that it is the greenest development computer in this market
“SiCortex has released the world’s greenest development computer, which also happens to be the world’s most compact parallel processing system,” said Christopher Stone, president and CEO of SiCortex. “Just unpack, plug in, turn on – and start working. There’s nothing else like it on the market. Competitor offerings are simply PCs masquerading as HPCs.”
And you don’t even have to read between the lines to figure out who that last sentence is aimed at. They take aim explicitly a few paragraphs down, and enlist no less than Jack Dongarra to help them make their point.
“Our whisper-quiet, energy-efficient SC072-PDS costs less than a one blade Cray CX-1, yet has more peak GFLops performance and three times the memory bandwidth,” said Rich Dischler, director of technical marketing at SiCortex.
…“The SC072-PDS is a wonderful platform for scalable application and algorithm development,” said Jack Dongarra, a University Distinguished Professor in electrical engineering and computer science department at the University of Tennessee. “By building a truly balanced architecture where the interconnect, memory bandwidth and compute capacity all play equal roles, the PDS represents the next step in bringing high core count computing to the masses. We can now develop and analyze algorithms right on the desktop with real confidence that they will scale out to our petascale platforms at Oak Ridge National Labs and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. This type of functionality is not yet available from other vendors; the closest offerings come with higher price tags and place significantly higher demands on power, space and cooling.”
Emphasis mine. Recall that SiCortex announced back in April that they were beginning a collaboration with Professor Dongarra; the terms of that collaboration were not announced.