Green Supercomputing

[Click on the above to play the video.]

I've mentioned SiCortex before, a company here in Maynard that is building a new generation of massively parallel computers. That's all well and good, but what about all the greenhouse gasses produced by the electricity required for those supercomputers? Solution: make your supercomputer low power enough that you can run it using pedal power -- that is, if you have 10 pretty fit peddlers like the UCLA Cycling Team.

The SC648 consumes about 1500 watts to produce a half teraflop with a terabyte of main memory. With 10 members of the cycling team, that means that each bicyclist is producing about 150 watts of power output, which, if you've ever gone to the Museum of Science and tried to do it yourself, isn't exactly light exercise. But as a marketing stunt, it's a good one, simply because it makes SiCortex's low power claim concrete, and concreteness is one of the six qualities of an idea that's Made to Stick. I doubt anyone that attended the conference will forget the human-powered supercomputer, but there's no word on what the results were for the computation that the cycling team powered.

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