At SC2006 in Tampa Bay, Florida, Terra Soft Solutions proposed the formation of a consortium to optimize life science applications for the Cell microprocessor. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with immediate commitment of time and resources by Argonne National Lab, Oak Ridge National Lab, Los Alamos National Lab, IBM, Mercury, and Rapid Mind.
In less than two months time, Terra Soft coordinated a Hack-a-thon, held in the newly completed Sony HPC facility at Terra Soft's Loveland head quarters. People flew to Colorado on just a few weeks notice to play a part in this first-ever collaborative event. For eight days in the 3rd week of January, Terra Soft hosted 44 individuals from three DOE labs, a half dozen universities and commercial ventures to learn about and gain first-hand experience programming the Cell microprocessor. Seven months later, Hack-a-thon II was held at the first ever Power Architecture Developer Conference in Austin, Texas.
A Powerful Resource.
Free to DOE, NASA, and University laboratories world-wide, the HPC Consortium provides access to high performance Linux OS systems with an immediate focus on the Cell Broadband Engine found in the IBM and Mercury Cell products and Sony PS3. Consortium members maintain free access to dedicated build-boxes, Cell blades, and a Sony PS3 cluster running Yellow Dog Linux, Y-HPC, and industry standards OpenMPI, Torque, and Moab; member mailling lists, wiki, and G-Forge project manager.
