[yellowdog-announce] HPC Consortium "hack-a-thon" moves into 3rd Day: Press Release 23 January 2007

[Announce List for all Terra Soft products (moderated)]

LOVELAND, Colorado - 23 January 2007 - The newly formed HPC Consortium moves 
into the third of six days of the first ever Cell processor "hack-a-thon" 
hosted at Terra Soft Solutions' headquarters in Loveland, Colorado.

The goal of the hack-a-thon is to showcase the potential of Cell optimized 
tools. With this success, Terra Soft will seek funding to complete the 
optimization of a full suite of bioinformatics applications. The Consortium 
will then grant free access for DoE and University labs and low-cost access 
for commercial entities to on-site Cell systems, thereby supporting the 
advancement of life sciences research.

This past Saturday, an early morning orientation by Terra Soft and IBM was 
followed by technical classes by Mercury and RapidMind. Mercury's Brian 
Bouzas and Michael Pepe offered an information rich seminar on programming 
for the Mercury Multi-Core Framework (MCF). Michael McCool of RapidMind 
engaged hack-a-thon attendees in an intense, multi-day introduction to their 
multi-core programming tools.

Michael Paolini, IBM Master Inventor, IBM Systems & Technology Group said, 
"The hack-a-thon is an interesting exercise in social & commercial 
collaboration ... the break-down of day-to-day barriers that otherwise 
interfere with open collaboration and research, while fostering and building 
relationships between individuals of cross disciplines and industries that 
might not have occurred on their own. To my taste, holding it in a working 
server lab designed to hold a powerful cluster is a wonderful backdrop. It 
underscores and serves to remind us of the stated mission and target outputs. 
I look forward to the seeing the results."

Terra Soft provides a 10Mb realworld and gigabit internal connection to 14 
PLAYSTATION(R)3s and Cell blades, 7 provided by Sony and 2 by IBM. While the 
newly constructed 3000 sq-ft server room awaits arrival of 128 PS3(TM)s Terra 
Soft staff created a living room atmosphere complete with foosball, beanbag 
chairs, couches, music, a make-shift movie theater, warm beverages and home 
cooked meals. All attendees brought laptops, and a few a PS3. Boeing's Mike 
Kvasnik established a complete remote office with PS3, G5 tower, two 
monitors, keyboard, and 3 laptops.

Following an intense day of learning, Saturday night found a half dozen 
individuals defending the earth from alien invasion via networked PS3s.

Robert Cook of Southern Georgia University states, "The blizzard outside is 
nothing compared to the maelstrom of intellectual give-and-take at Terra 
Soft's HPC Hack-A-Thon. The result is a rare free flow of ideas. Vendors are 
modifying product specs and offerings on-the-fly based on feedback from 
workshop attendees. Action items were piling up faster than the snow outside. 
Terra Soft ... [enabled] a walk-in-and-learn environment. Becoming coding 
buddies with total strangers is a great experience."

Sunday was a time to absorb the information gained Saturday, rest, and enjoy 
the Colorado winter. Some attendees slept in or caught a movie, while others 
ventured to the mountains to ski, snowshoe, or sled.

D. Molly offers, "Prior to coming to this event, I had installed the IBM SDK 
on a virtualized FC5 machine, but had not written or compiled any Cell BE 
code. By the end of the first day, I had compiled, run, and benchmarked three 
different sample applications on actual Cell BE based hardware and was 
prepared to write basic applications using the tools and techniques that 
could harness the PPE and all the SPE resources available on the Cell chip. 
The face-to-face interaction with TerraSoft, IBM, Mercury, and RapidMind has 
been extremely valuable in learning how to effectively program for this new 
architecture, and how it is genuinely different than (and a huge leap ahead 
of) other multi-core computing architectures ... will save valuable time when 
developing our own applications. This quantity of information would have 
taken weeks to assemble via email, telephone, and other means. Seeing IBM's 
roadmap for the Cell BE also shows this architecture to be a stable 
platform ... [continuing] to realize added performance gains in future 
generations of the Cell chip."

Monday made way for further classroom education and time for individuals to 
create their working environments on PS3s or Cell blades. Today, participants 
move into their personal projects with just four days to complete 
optimization.

The HPC Consortium hack-a-thon concludes with the close of Friday. By the 
close of Q1 '07, Terra Soft will construct an on-line framework for the HPC 
Consortium, a foundation for on-going Cell development and optimization via 
remote connections the existing and forthcoming PS3 cluster.

	For more information, a calendar of events, and photos, visit:
	http://www.hpc-consortium.net/events/hack-a-thon/


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


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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 
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