AUSTIN, Texas - 23 September 2007 - The HPC Consortium moves into the second day of Hack-a-thon II, sponsored by IBM, Power.org, and Terra Soft,
hosted at the Austin Convention Center, Austin, Texas.
As with the original Hack-a-thon, the goal of this second gathering is to bring people of varied backgrounds in programming into a shared arena where they are given uninterrupted time on dedicated Cell systems to port existing and develop new code for Cell based systems.
While the effort to optimize code for the Cell processor is always a first step, the in-room 8 node PS3 cluster grants a unique opportunity to also work with both a parallel and distributed Cell environment.
Projects in motion include:
Wireless security cryptographic analysis. Distributed ray tracing via a 3-D fractal Julia set. Application of the Cell optimized FFTW against a scheduling algorithm. Library development to ease the migration of apps to Cell. Procedural graphics rendering. Differential equations.
Housed in room 12A on the 4th floor of the Austin Convention Center, Hack-a-thon II started Saturday afternoon, two days prior to the Power Architecture
Developer Conference (PADC) where educational presentations by experts from IBM, Freescale, PA Semi, AMCC, and ISVs describe the current and future offerings
of the Power architecture ecosystem.
Yesterday, Hack-a-thon II opened with a demonstration of the construction of an 8 node PS3 cluster running Yellow Dog Linux and Y-HPC, followed by an introduction to RapidMind's development environment for Cell by founder Michael McCool.
When the pizzas arrived in the evening, attendees rose from the comfort of their "Power.org" emblazoned bean bag chairs and set aside laptops to enjoy a late-night frisbee free-for-all in the otherwise empty convention center corridors.
Today attendees returned for breakfast, collaborative coding, lunch, and then presentations by Steven Guccione of Cmpware and Michael McCool of RapidMind. Monday and Tuesday the hack-a-thon room and facilities will provide hands-on experience with a Cell cluster to all PADC attendees. The HPC Consortium Hack-a-thon II concludes with the close of PADC, Tuesday afternoon.
To learn more about the HPC Consortium & Hack-a-thon II:
www.hpc-consortium.net/events/200709/
To learn more about PADC, visit: www.power.org/devcon/07
About the HPC Consortium
As featured on the cover of the August issue (#160) of Linux Journal, the HPC Consortium provides access to high performance Linux OS systems with an immediate focus on the Cell Broadband Engine found in the IBM, Mercury, and Sony products. The Consortium facilities are free to DoE and university laboratories and to commercial entities for a fee.
For more information, visit www.hpc-consortium.net
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.
