In the News

Supercomputer maker SiCortex launched its first MIPS-based Linux machines back in November 2006 and has been gradually ramping up sales. To help make its sales pitch easier, the company this week announced a kicker to its original boxes, which now support faster processors, a tweaked software stack, and manufacturing costs that SiCortex is passing on to its customers as lower prices.

SiCortex announced yesterday that it has doubled the price/performance ratio of its entire product line. The increase in efficiency comes by the way of a performance bump on the silicon, advancements in system software and leading-edge compilers. They released some initial TCO numbers compared to an Intel x86-based cluster.

When I wrote about the new Cray CX1 and the brief and unfortunate history of personal supercomputing platforms in yesterday's blog, I intentionally didn't mention the SC072 deskside machine from SiCortex. This is because I knew I was about to get an update from the company about their product line and because the SC072 machine is not being positioned as an HPC production system, which the CX1 is. But that doesn't mean the gang at SiCortex isn't following the Cray announcement with a great deal of interest.

With the recent closing of the final tranche of a $37 million Series B round of funding and the installation of a new CEO last month, Maynard-based high-performance computing technology developer SiCortex Inc. is making the leap from being a research and development company to one bringing a new breed of high-performance computing architecture to market. And according to officials, customers are lining up

Greg Kline Purdue is the first university to test SiCortex’s top-of-the-line model. The high performance, research-focused computing arm of Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP), the Rosen Center is leasing the experimental machine for more than a year’s testing with an option to buy if it proves useful to Purdue researchers.