Digital Equipment's old mill bears SiCortex, a new computer company

Blackfriars is located in Clock Tower Place, which once was the headquarters for mini-computer giant, Digital Equipment. Today, that company is no more, having been absorbed into the depths of Hewlett Packard. But for New England residents, many of us think of the mill as home to "our" computer company, Digital.

Today, the Wall Street Journal published an article about a company here in the mill called SiCortex that boasts a new low-power twist on supercomputing:

SiCortex licensed a microprocessor design from MIPS Technologies Inc., and packed the equivalent of six such electronic brains and communications circuitry on a single piece of silicon. One of those chips, combined with a set of memory chips, draws about 15 watts of power, compared with 250 watts for a computing element in a standard cluster, the company says.

The company's top-of-the-line supercomputer has 972 such chips -- or 5,832 processors in all -- in a cabinet a little less than six feet tall. A cluster with comparable performance might need eight to 10 cabinets, and would draw about 10 times more power than SiCortex's machine, Mr. Mucci said.

Looked at another way, SiCortex estimates that one of its $1.5 million machines delivers three to 10 times the computing performance of a cluster at the same price. The company is also offering a smaller system -- with 108 chips, containing 648 processors -- for $200,000. Each system has a single power cord; clusters may have dozens.

SiCortex promises the end of do-it-yourself Linux supercomputer clusters, and more importantly, promises that its clusters will consume an order of magnitude less power than one you build yourself. And the people behind the company aren't lightweights. Most of them are 20- and 30-year veterans of parallel processing and supercomputing, ranging from Thinking Machines to Bolt Beranek and Newman. And their product promises to take supercomputers out of their glass houses and put them in places that ordinary people can use them. After all, they were born in a 150-year-old New England mill.

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