[yellowdog-announce] HPC Consortium Hack-a-thon II Mid-Event Summary: 23 September 2007

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

HPC Consortium Hack-a-thon II Mid-Event Summary

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 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, and the Y-HPC cross-architecture 
cluster construction suite.

For more information, visit www.terrasoftsolutions.com


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