Linux Supercomputer Maker SiCortex Lands $10 Million in Funding

Published: July 31, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Linux pretty much owns the top-end of the high performance computing market these days, thanks to its similarity to Unix, its open source nature, its ports to many chip architectures, and its fine-turning on X64 processors. And it owns a lot of the low-end of the supercomputer space, too, for all the same reasons. That does not, however, mean there is no room for improvement, and venture capitalists, hoping to make a buck or millions on the desire to improve the performance per watt of systems, know this.

That's why SiCortex, a startup Linux supercomputer maker from Maynard, Massachusetts, that was founded in 2003, has been able to secure a total of $52 million in two rounds of venture capital funding and one round of debt to date. The latest round, a $10 million venture debt for SiCortex, was announced this week and comes from Hercules Technology Growth Capital, a venture capitalist from Palo Alto, California, that invests in technology and life sciences firms. Last December, SiCortex named John Rollwagen, formerly the chairman and chief executive officer of Cray Research from 1981 through 1993, as its chairman; Rollwagen is also an investor in SiCortex, as is Chevron Technology Ventures, Flagship Ventures, JK&B Capital, Polaris Venture Partners, and Prism VentureWorks.

Last November, SiCortex launched its first HPC systems, which are based on the idea of putting a six-node computing cluster on a single chip--a so-called system on a chip, or SoC design. By getting all of the interconnections down to the silicon level, rather than linking everything in the cluster through massive external networks that generate a lot of heat, SiCortex says that it can get a six-node cluster capable of 6 gigaflops of number-crunching power down to about 10 watts of juice, and with DDR2 main memory for the node, the wattage only goes up to around 15 watts per node. A typical Linux server node runs around 250 watts after a lot of extraneous stuff is ripped out of the box, according to SiCortex.

The SiCortex SoC design includes on-chip PCI Express port for linking to storage, as well as two memory controllers and a cluster interconnect (fabric switch) for linking SoC modules to each other. Each chip has its own L1 cache, plus a shared 1.5 MB L2 cache. The chip core is based on the MIPS processor, which was created by Silicon Graphics but subsequently abandoned by SGI for Intel's Itanium processor. MIPS chips live on inside routers and other embedded devices, and increasingly inside supercomputers, and in the Revolution x16 supercomputer announced by Movidis a year ago at LinuxWorld.

The top-end SC5832 machine has 5,832 processors, 8 TB of memory, 2.1 terabits/sec of I/O bandwidth, and is rated at 5.8 teraflops. A smaller SC648 system has 648 processors, 864 GB of memory, 240 gigabits/sec of I/O bandwidth, and is rated at 640 teraflops. The latter machine takes up only half of a standard server rack and can plug into normal 110-volt wall power. Both machines run a variant of Linux and the open source Lustre cluster file system.

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