ACADEMIA

SPECIAL COVERAGE FROM ISC2006ClearSpeed Technology (LSE:CSD), the leader in the emerging market for energy-efficient math library accelerators, today announced a new RoHS-compliant, smaller form factor for the Advance(TM) accelerator board. Available immediately, the Advance board is also part of the recently announced supercomputer architecture for Bristol University, and will be integrated into IBM's System Cluster 1350 solution in the second half of 2006. Preliminary performance tests with two ClearSpeed Advance accelerator boards in Intel's newly-announced dual-core Xeon(R) Processor Series 5100 (previously code named Woodcrest) system delivered a Linpack benchmark result of over 93 GFlops. The base system with two 3GHz processors has a theoretical peak performance of 48 GFlops. The ClearSpeed CSX600, the world's fastest and most power efficient 64-bit floating point processor, is an embedded parallel processor with 96 cores that executes up to 25 billion 64-bit floating-point operations per second (Flops) while averaging less than 10 Watts of energy. The new Advance accelerator board combines two CSX600 processors in a PCI-X form factor that delivers up to 50 GFlops of sustained double-precision general matrix-matrix multiply (DGEMM) performance while averaging less than 25W. It is two-thirds the length of its predecessor, allowing it to fit in an expanded range of systems. While today's visionaries are pushing the next wave of high performance computing system architectures by deploying hybrid clusters where a range of complementary technologies are combined to deliver the optimum match of overall performance and capability, they are increasingly conscious of the environmental and economic impact of those systems. In addition to the space and power savings that result from its small form factor and energy-efficient design, the new board is fully compliant with the European Union's Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) regulations which prohibit the use of materials such as lead in new electrical and electronic equipment. The new ClearSpeed Advance board plugs into industry standard workstations and servers without any modification. Microsoft Windows XP and Linux operating systems (Red Hat and SUSE) are supported. Drivers are currently available for x86 and x86-64 systems. "Pursuing the quest for knowledge creates an insatiable thirst for compute cycles," said Tom Beese, CEO for ClearSpeed. "Delivering that performance with minimal power consumption and in environmentally-friendly packaging is central to ClearSpeed's design philosophy."