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SiCortex shut down in May 2009 after venture investors withdrew funding. The Massachusetts company had designed energy-conscious supercomputers for scientific workloads that could use many processors at once. Its systems were not general-purpose speed upgrades: they traded fast individual cores for parallel processing and lower power and cooling demands.
Why did SiCortex shut down?
The immediate trigger was a funding shortfall. In a contemporaneous Computerworld report, co-founder and chief architect Jud Leonard said one investor had overcommitted and backed away, while other investors could not provide replacement capital. The company needed millions of dollars for another chip design and fabrication cycle, and Leonard estimated it was still about a year and a half from cash-flow break-even.
The funding problem played out amid a difficult market: SiCortex was competing with established Intel and AMD platforms while developing custom hardware that required substantial upfront investment. The recession formed part of the backdrop, but the available reporting does not establish it as the sole cause. Leonard described the competitive challenge: “You’re up against a very well established, strongly entrenched business and you know, Intel is a fierce competitor.”
What happened to SiCortex?
SiCortex shipped its first beta system in July 2007 and entered production in early 2008, according to Computerworld. By the time it closed in May 2009, the company had about 80 customers and had raised about $68 million in financing and venture debt, the report said. Its largest systems cost more than $1 million.
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A 2009 asset-sale memorandum from Gerbsman Partners offered the company’s systems, software, engineering assets, customer relationships and partially completed next-generation hardware to potential acquirers. That was a historical sale process, not an ongoing storefront or support channel.
The closure did not immediately take customer machines offline. SiCortex kept a skeleton crew to support customers for a time, and Purdue continued running its SC5832. Purdue CIO Gerry McCartney said, “We’re not going to unplug it just because the company’s gone away.” That statement describes Purdue’s decision in 2009; it does not establish current support or service availability.
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One part of the business had a reported afterlife: Cray acquired SiCortex’s PathScale compiler suite because Cray customers used it. Computerworld said the rest of SiCortex’s core intellectual property had not been purchased as of its 2009 report; that time-specific account should not be read as a statement about ownership today.
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What was a SiCortex computer?
SiCortex built dense high-performance computing systems for scientific research. Instead of relying on a small number of high-clock-speed processors, its design connected many relatively modest MIPS processors through an integrated communications fabric. Each system component included part of the switching fabric, Leonard explained, avoiding a separate fabric-switching component.
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The goal was to put many processors in one system while limiting electricity use and cooling demand. Purdue’s SC5832, as described by Computerworld in 2009, contained 5,832 processors and had a stated capacity of 8 trillion calculations per second. Purdue used it for work in fields including aeronautics, computer science, nanoelectronic devices and mechanical engineering.
Were SiCortex computers energy efficient?
They were designed to reduce power and cooling requirements, but energy efficiency did not mean they were faster at every task. Purdue CIO Gerry McCartney said the systems used less power and required less cooling than Purdue’s other machines, while explaining the workload fit this way: “When researchers need lots of processors to perform a task, and don’t care about the speed of each one, the SiCortex computers are often the right choice, he says.”
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The asset-sale memorandum claimed SiCortex systems used 60–80% less electricity than comparably capable Intel-based systems. That is a seller-side claim in a 2009 document, not an independently verified measurement. A separate 2011 technical chapter describes the MIPS processors as running at 500 MHz initially and later 700 MHz; those historical clock speeds are not a current performance comparison.
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The basic tradeoff was parallel throughput versus per-core speed. Jobs that could be divided across many processors could suit the architecture; software dependent on a few fast cores could fare poorly. Cray vice president of scalable systems Barry Bolding summarized the commercial challenge: “The idea of high performance computing that’s highly energy efficient is a difficult space, because you’re trading off performance.”
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Can you buy or get support for a SiCortex system now?
The available sources establish a 2009 closure and a historical asset-sale process, but do not establish a present-day sales channel, support provider, spare-parts supply or repair path. SiCortex systems were specialized institutional clusters, not ordinary consumer computers, so generic HPC components should not be assumed compatible.
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