Silicon Mechanics, a mid-sized manufacturer of rackmount servers, clusters, and storage arrays, is celebrating their 10th birthday by giving away a lot of stuff. First, they did a great job sponsoring Boston University in the recently concluded SC11 Student Cluster Competition. Fueled by Silicon Mechanics gear, the team was able to snare 4th place overall – quite an achievement given the caliber and experience of the competitors they went up against.
Team Boston, aided by Art Mann of Silicon Mechanics, had one of the largest and most powerful configurations in the contest. It was a hybrid system with 11 dual-socket nodes containing 336 AMD Interlagos cores, 352 GB of main memory, and four of the latest NVIDIA Tesla C2090 GPU accelerators.
While the team appreciated the gear, they also really appreciated the personal support given them by the entire Silicon Mechanics organization. The students told me that the company was constantly checking with them before and during the competition, asking whether they needed anything and offering to help out. That’s a quite a bit of attention to an effort that isn’t going to garner a huge amount of attention or result in a big sale. (Read more below…)
But Silicon Mechanics isn’t done. They’re going yet another extra mile by inviting researchers to apply for a grant to receive the former ‘Team Boston’ cluster. The grant is open to any U.S. or Canadian post-secondary educational institution (or research affiliates); non-profit research labs; or researchers at government labs. Qualified applicants can submit their proposals from now through February 15, 2012. The winning proposal will be announced March 15, 2012. Rules and the application form are available at here.
In the video, I talk with Art Mann about how they got involved with the Student Cluster Competition, why they decided to sponsor a team, and about the grant program. One thing I didn’t ask was whether the members of Team Boston were going to sign the skins of the system before it’s sent out to the lucky grant recipient… or include one of their custom SCC t-shirts… or, better yet, throw in the “I am Spartacus” outfits they wore during the latter parts of the competition.