The Story Behind a Failed HPC Startup

jbrodkin writes "SiCortex had an idea that it thought would take the supercomputing world by storm — build the most energy-efficient HPC clusters on the planet. But the recession, and the difficulties of penetrating a market dominated by Intel-based machines, proved to be too much for the company to handle. SiCortex ended up folding earlier this year, and its story may be a cautionary tale for startups trying to bring innovation to the supercomputing industry."

Comments

Re:GPU's?

[peawee03]

Currently, Teslas are the single-precision future. All my work is in double precision (64-bit), which is where most GPUs are much much slower. IIRC, the next generation GPUs are going to have respectable double precision performance, but they're way down the road- hopefully I'll have moved on to a job where it doesn't matter by then. Hell, I consider it a victory when I've gotten a code translated from FORTRAN 77 to Fortran 95. GPUs? I'll wait until next decade. More normal cores are low-hanging fruit I can use with any MPI code *now*.