The Hack-a-thon brought together people interested in Cell technology from all over the country. Experts in bioinformatics, climatology, graphics, visualization, and computer science descended upon Loveland, Colorado for a Cell software development blitzkrieg. What ensued was a free form, cross-pollinating, spontaneous, whiteboarding, brainstorming, collaborative, cooperative, and creative forum driven largely by the participants themselves as they sought to orient and educate themselves on the Cell BE processor.

Michael Paolini, IBM Master Inventor, IBM Systems & Technology Group said, "The hack-a-thon is an interesting exercise in social & commercial collaboration ... the break-down of day-to-day barriers that otherwise interfere with open collaboration and research, while fostering and building relationships between individuals of cross disciplines and industries that might not have occurred on their own. To my taste, holding it in a working server lab designed to hold a powerful cluster is a wonderful backdrop. It underscores and serves to remind us of the stated mission and target outputs. I look forward to the seeing the results."

In a grassroots fashion, the hack-a-thon gave birth to a unique international community whose members come from academia, DOE labs, and several industries. The overwhelming response from folks was that they completed in one week what would have taken them 3 months to do on their own.

• There was expert instruction and impromptu tutelage from industry experts at IBM, Mercury, and RapidMind.
  
  
• No fewer than 4 development toolkits were invoked: RapidMind, Indiana University's CorePy, Mercury's MCF, IBM's SDK.
  
  
• Local work began with (and in some cases extended prior efforts) several bioinformatics algorithms (BLAST, HMMER, ClustalW, Smith-Waterman), while other consortium members across the globe began remote development on molecular dynamics code (Gromacs).
  
  
• Mesa was re-engineered to utilize Cell BE SPEs, resulting in astonishing 80x acceleration.
  
  
• Povray and VTK porting were a success.
  
  
• A special purpose kernel built with kprobes and SystemTap support was successfully built by the LANL folks.
  
  
• A Cell BE compiler was created for Windows.
  
  
• The configuration of several developmental tools, such as Eclipse, remote desktop access, and cross compiling environments were completed.
  
  
• Professors and graduate students from CSU and UC, Boulder participated.
  
  
• Subversion code repositories have been established for participants' projects.
  
  
• All project progress and direction continue to be documented on the Consortium wiki.

Robert Cook of Southern Georgia University offered, "The blizzard outside [was] nothing compared to the maelstrom of intellectual give-and-take at Terra Soft's HPC Hack-A-Thon. The result is a rare free flow of ideas. Vendors are modifying product specs and offerings on-the-fly based on feedback from workshop attendees. Action items were piling up faster than the snow outside. Terra Soft ... [enabled] a walk-in-and-learn environment. Becoming coding buddies with total strangers is a great experience."

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