The garage sale (or should I say tag sale given the New England location) that is SiCortex is disheartening. I worked with SiCortex enough to know that it was "SiCortex" not "SciCortex" as so many were apt to write. I also knew that these were smart people. They were doing the good work. There was no smoke and mirrors, no shining up yet another mass market turd, just bright people delivering on a daring idea. We need more of this not less.
The idea was simple. Instead of doing HPC with clusters employing faster and hotter processors, use many power efficient processors and a great interconnect. Oh yea, and use Linux from the ground up. Keep it open, keep it right. And, it worked quite well.
I have in the past talked with marketing people who seemed clueless about what they were really selling. Not SiCortex. They lived and breathed their technological value proposition. I could tell when I wrote a white paper for them. Theirs was not a "me to" product, nor was it another 1U server or blade with the latest x86 platform in it.
I suspect that the demise of SiCortex is more about the inability of the venture firms to fund the company than their ability to sell supercomputers or push the envelope. They had not yet turned a profit, but seemed to be on their way. I wish the employees of SiCortex a good transition and thanks for being brave.
Dammit.
