A Possible Partner?

Associate of Terra Soft,

I would personally like to welcome everyone to the high performance computing (HPC) research consortium mailing list sponsored by Terra Soft. Per the previous email, the enthusiastic response to Terra Soft's formation of a consortium designed to drive adoption of the Cell processor in HPC has precipitated the planning of a Cell Hack-a-thon here at Terra Soft headquarters.

I would like to take this opportunity to mention that the consortium's main goal is to provide consortium members remote access to a large Cell-based Linux cluster in order to accelerate their scientific and software development research. Access to the cluster will be free of charge for university and DoE laboratory researchers. Terra Soft can provide researchers access to PlayStation3 development units right now in order to begin code porting efforts to the Cell processor. In fact, the Hack-a-thon will utilize the development units and other Cell-based hardware during its focused code porting efforts. The Hack-a-thon is designed to quickly achieve a critical mass of applications ported to the Cell processor, which will help increase consortium participation, membership, and traction with sponsors. You were added to the consortium list because:

1) you expressed an interest in gaining access to the Cell cluster for research and/or software development purposes

2) you are interested in supporting the Cell consortium in some way

Terra Soft believes that other processor technologies like graphics cards (GPUs) will also make important contributions to petascale computing. Therefore, secondary goals of the consortium include providing RapidMind and PeakStream software tools to consortium members so that they can increase application performance by porting them to run on powerful graphics cards (GPUs). Plans to include application acceleration with GPUs in the Hack-a-thon curriculum are underway.

Terra Soft will officially launch the consortium and its web site in a few days, but I will officially launch it to the consortium right here. You can find the consortium website at http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/consortium/.

Click on the "Submit a Proposal" link to request cluster access, and the "Hack-a-thon" and "Local Accommodations" links for information on the code porting party plans. The "Life Sciences" link will provide you more information about Terra Soft's dedication and concerted efforts in that area.

If you would like to obtain access to the PlayStation3 development units, please email this list and I will make arrangements with you off-list. If you prefer to discuss other consortium activities off-list, you can reach me at email@nowhere.com.

I look forward to working with all of you to build the future of HPC-based scientific inquiry.

I have something I am cooking up for a future bandwidth/storage/analytics challenge entry. (aka another attempt at the 'trifecta' that I took part in a year and change ago). I'v started my experiments, but with some of the politics going on at work...well...let's say things are interesting! It might interfere with this too. Alas. We shall see though.