SC11: Research Cluster Grant to Follow Student Cluster Competition

Cluster Competition

The annual Student Cluster Competition at SC11 this year (November 14 - 18 right here in Seattle) will have a new entrant. Silicon Mechanics is working with the team from Boston University, the CyberTerriers and the CyberRhett cluster, to compete for honor, glory, and bragging rights. Using current-generation cluster hardware, they will be building a small cluster of their own design, and racing to demonstrate the greatest sustained performance across a series of applications.

Silicon Mechanics would like to say a huge thank you to our vendor partners who have contributed hardware to this effort: Kingston Technology, QLogic, AMD, NVIDIA, Supermicro, and Seagate.

Cluster Research Grant

When the cluster competition is over and student teams have gone back to their classes, we will still have an outstanding GPU-enabled department or workgroup cluster. Along with our hardware partners, we are pleased to announce that Silicon Mechanics will be sponsoring a unique opportunity: a grant program to give that cluster hardware to a university or research institution. The grant program is open to all US and Canadian qualified post-secondary institutions, university-affiliated research institutions, non-profit research institutions, and researchers at federal labs with university affiliations.

The grant program will be officially announced on Monday, November 14th, 2011, to coincide with the Supercomputing 2011 Conference in Seattle. More information, rules, and application materials will be available at www.siliconmechanics.com/research_cluster_grant.

Other SC Highlights

Along with our participation in the Student Cluster Competition, we will have some other great hardware on display:

• See our cluster featuring Intel EPSD Hardware running Flow3D in the Intel Booth
• Find out about the new "Bulldozer" processors from AMD, the world's first x86 16-core processor
• Look over our upcoming storage products from Infortrend
• See our Intel Xeon Processor-based 5U 8P server (with room for 4 NVIDIA Tesla GPUs) up close

Newest Products

Enabling Open Compute Architecture

Silicon Mechanics is proud to enable Open Compute delivery, bringing the Open Compute architecture to deployments of all sizes. The Open Compute Project began with an initiative at Facebook to build one of the most efficient computing infrastructures in the world at the lowest possible cost. The result of that work was released by Facebook, and constitutes an open hardware standard that delivers data centers full of vanity-free servers which are efficient, inexpensive, and easy to maintain. For more information, email sales@siliconmechanics.com, or call your Sales Expert at 1-866-352-1173.

Cloud Computing from Silicon Mechanics and Piston Cloud

Silicon Mechanics is proud to announce that we have partnered with Piston Cloud Computing to become their first certified hardware vendor. The Piston Enterprise OS™ (pentOS™) is a new cloud operating system designed for ease of use, security, and open enterprise private cloud environments. The pentOS-powered system runs on a custom cloud configuration and includes all cabling, power management, networking, and servers required to deploy and operate a pentOS private cloud. For more information, visit our configurator, email sales@siliconmechanics.com, or call your Sales Expert at 1-866-352-1173.

Hard Drive Shortages

The people of Thailand are in our thoughts as they continue to battle the floodwaters that have created havoc in Bangkok and outlying areas. This disaster, in addition to costing over 400 lives so far, is resulting in shortages of hard disk drives, and is pushing prices up. Silicon Mechanics is preparing information to help our customers anticipate problems they may face over the next few months and formulate plans and alternative strategies. If you have questions or concerns about needing hard drives, please feel free to contact your Silicon Mechanics Sales Expert to discuss questions of timing and review your alternatives.


Back to List of Newsletters