LOVELAND, Colorado - 23 January 2007 - The newly formed HPC Consortium moves into the third of six days of the first ever Cell processor "hack-a-thon" hosted at Terra Soft Solutions' headquarters in Loveland, Colorado.
The goal of the hack-a-thon is to showcase the potential of Cell optimized tools. With this success, Terra Soft will seek funding to complete the optimization of a full suite of bioinformatics applications. The Consortium will then grant free access for DoE and University labs and low-cost access for commercial entities to on-site Cell systems, thereby supporting the advancement of life sciences research.
This past Saturday, an early morning orientation by Terra Soft and IBM was
followed by technical classes by Mercury and RapidMind. Mercury's Brian
Bouzas and Michael Pepe offered an information rich seminar on programming
for the Mercury Multi-Core Framework (MCF). Michael McCool of RapidMind
engaged hack-a-thon attendees in an intense, multi-day introduction to their
multi-core programming tools.
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."
Terra Soft provides a 10Mb realworld and gigabit internal connection to 14 PLAYSTATION(R)3s and Cell blades, 7 provided by Sony and 2 by IBM. While the newly constructed 3000 sq-ft server room awaits arrival of 128 PS3(TM)s Terra Soft staff created a living room atmosphere complete with foosball, beanbag chairs, couches, music, a make-shift movie theater, warm beverages and home cooked meals. All attendees brought laptops, and a few a PS3. Boeing's Mike Kvasnik established a complete remote office with PS3, G5 tower, two monitors, keyboard, and 3 laptops.
Following an intense day of learning, Saturday night found a half dozen individuals defending the earth from alien invasion via networked PS3s.
Robert Cook of Southern Georgia University states, "The blizzard outside is 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."
Sunday was a time to absorb the information gained Saturday, rest, and enjoy the Colorado winter. Some attendees slept in or caught a movie, while others ventured to the mountains to ski, snowshoe, or sled.
D. Molly offers, "Prior to coming to this event, I had installed the IBM SDK on a virtualized FC5 machine, but had not written or compiled any Cell BE code. By the end of the first day, I had compiled, run, and benchmarked three different sample applications on actual Cell BE based hardware and was prepared to write basic applications using the tools and techniques that could harness the PPE and all the SPE resources available on the Cell chip. The face-to-face interaction with TerraSoft, IBM, Mercury, and RapidMind has been extremely valuable in learning how to effectively program for this new architecture, and how it is genuinely different than (and a huge leap ahead of) other multi-core computing architectures ... will save valuable time when developing our own applications. This quantity of information would have taken weeks to assemble via email, telephone, and other means. Seeing IBM's roadmap for the Cell BE also shows this architecture to be a stable platform ... [continuing] to realize added performance gains in future generations of the Cell chip."
Monday made way for further classroom education and time for individuals to create their working environments on PS3s or Cell blades. Today, participants move into their personal projects with just four days to complete optimization.
The HPC Consortium hack-a-thon concludes with the close of Friday. By the close of Q1 '07, Terra Soft will construct an on-line framework for the HPC Consortium, a foundation for on-going Cell development and optimization via remote connections to existing systems and forthcoming PS3 cluster.
For a historic review of the event, projects, and photos visit:
www.terrasoftsolutions.com/showcase/cellebration/hack-a-thons/
About Terra Soft Solutions, Inc.
As the recognized leader in Linux for Power since 1999, Terra Soft provides turn-key, integrated solutions built upon IBM, Mercury, and Sony systems, board support packages for Power OEMs, and cross-architecture Linux applications for high performance computing. Terra Soft develops Yellow Dog Linux, the leading 32/64-bit Linux OS for the Power architecture, first to market with support for the Cell processor; the Y-HPC cross-architecture cluster construction suite; and Y-Bio, a cross-architecture gene sequence analysis suite for both workstations and clusters.
For more information, visit www.terrasoftsolutions.com
PLAYSTATION is a registered trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. Power is a trademark of IBM. YDL, Y-HPC, and Y-Bio are trademarks of Terra Soft Solutions. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Additional product and company names mentioned may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective holders.
