Argonne Lab Buys First Production SiCortex Supercomputer

Published: October 23, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

SiCortex, the upstart Linux supercomputer maker based in the high-tech corridor outside of Boston, has scored its first big sale. Argonne National Laboratory, one of the big research and computing facilities run by the U.S. Department of Energy, is ponying up the tax dollars to buy a top-end SiCortex box.

Argonne National Lab is getting an SC5832 machine, which has 5,832 processors, has 8 TB of memory, and has 2.1 terabits/sec of I/O bandwidth. The box is rated at a peak of 5.8 teraflops. The price that Argonne National Lab paid for the box was not divulged.

SiCortex was founded in 2003, and the company has created a machine that is based on home-grown processors that put a six-node computing cluster on a single chip. The 64-bit cores on the chips are a variant of the MIPS processor created a zillion years ago by Silicon Graphics, which runs a variant of Linux that is tuned to the processors. That six-node cluster-on-a-chip is capable of 6 gigaflops of number-crunching power, and consumes about 10 watts of electricity, 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--and that is after a lot of extraneous peripherals are removed. To make a supercomputer, SiCortex gangs up multiple of these processor modules together. Each module has an on-chip PCI Express port for linking to storage, as well as two memory controllers and a cluster interconnect (fabric switch) for linking modules to each other; each processor core on the chip has its own L1 cache, plus a shared 1.5 MB L2 cache for all six cores. The fully loaded SC5832 runs at about 20 kilowatts--which is what a rack of blade servers with a lot less computing power burns these days.

The Maynard, Massachusetts, company is hoping that a lot more labs are interested in the SiCortex design because of its energy efficiency. SiCortex has secured a total of $52 million in two rounds of venture capital funding and one round of debt, and almost a year ago it chose John Rollwagen, formerly the chairman and chief executive officer of Cray Research from 1981 through 1993, as its chairman. Rollwagen is an investor in SiCortex, as is Chevron Technology Ventures, Flagship Ventures, JK&B Capital, Polaris Venture Partners, and Prism VentureWorks.

Not everyone needs 5.8 teraflops of computing to start, which is why SiCortex makes the smaller SC648 system, which 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 the open source Lustre cluster file system as well as the home-grown version of Linux, which is almost certainly a variant of Debian Linux and maybe, just maybe, Ubuntu.

Argonne National Lab is managed by the nerds at the University of Chicago, and the SC5832 will be used in Argonne's Mathematics and Computer Science division, which has been a key contributor to the open source software that drives the high-performance computing market. Exactly what the lab will do with the box--aside from testing its architecture running a variety of astrophysics, climate modeling, biotech, seismic, and oil and gas exploration applications--is not clear. But what is clear is that getting a big lab to take the first box is how a lot of new computing architectures, operating systems, and compilers got their start in the commercial world.

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