OMECC - Open Milwaukee Educational Computing Cluster

A Fireseed project currently called OMECC is being developed to build a streaming supercomputer (Open Milwaukee Educational Computing Cluster).

Justin, the founder of Fireseed, Milwaukee's only casual think tank, met today with Luke and myself to discuss next steps on the way to forming an OMECC project group and launching the project. We discussed potential tasks, such as nuclear fusion simulation, for the OMECC supercomputer, ballpark project costs, potential project participants, hardware and software issues and project funding. It was agreed the next step is to write and submit a 250 word abstract to the 2007 Wisconsin Governor's Business Plan contest for the OMECC project.

The goal of the Fireseed OMECC is to build a low cost supercomputer which will rank in the top 500 supercomputers in the world in terms of computing power (teraflops). The low cost is made possible by the tremendous simulation capabilities enabled through multi-core processors on top-end consumer graphics cards. To the best of Justin's knowledge, Milwaukee does not currently have a supercomputer available to organizations or individuals at a reasonable cost for simulation research and other high-end computing work. One goal of the OMECC project is providing this resource for Milwaukee and Wisconsin.

This supercomputer will be available for development work on streaming supercomputer programming and for other demanding computing tasks in which Wisconsin companies are interested. It will also be used as a platform for further development work on next-generation versions of this novel class of supercomputers.

If you have an interest in learning more about this project or in collaborating on the project, please contact Justin or me. Get involved now, help shape the OMECC project, and help make this project a reality!

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