ClearSpeed Technology (LSE:CSD), a developer of high-performance, low-power, programmable co-processor solutions, announced that Dr. John Gustafson of Sun Microsystems has joined ClearSpeed as chief technology officer of high performance computing. "With our CSX600 processor about to release, John will play a key role in delivering ClearSpeed's plug-and-play solutions to enterprise and HPC customers," said Mike Calise, ClearSpeed's U.S. president. "John's leadership in innovative high performance computing aligns perfectly with ClearSpeed's mission of significantly increasing the performance of computing systems," said Tom Beese, ClearSpeed CEO. Prior to joining ClearSpeed, Dr. Gustafson was a senior scientist and a principal investigator for the Sun Microsystems High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program. His most recent work has involved the 2009 timeframe of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiative. Dr. Gustafson holds applied mathematics degrees from the California Institute of Technology and Iowa State University. With over 30 years of experience, Dr. Gustafson has become a pioneer in the world of high performance computing as he continues to create and refine the technology of HPC. "ClearSpeed is emerging as a leader by delivering co-processor solutions that address the performance per watt needs of the HPC industry," said Gustafson. "I'm excited to bring my industry knowledge and leadership to this group." Product availability and support Gustafson's hiring comes as ClearSpeed prepares the launch of the company's first commercial product, the CSX600. The CSX600 is a 64-bit co-processor that has 96 processing elements and runs at 25 GFLOPS (DGEMM) sustained double precision floating point performance at about 10 Watts. The processor can be applied to high-performance computing applications or as a standalone embedded processor where large volumes of data can be processed in parallel. The CSX600 will also be offered in a CSX Advance PCI-X plug-in card that can be easily integrated as a high-performance co-processor accelerator in a workstation, server or cluster. Details on product availability of the ClearSpeed CSX600 and support will be released in Q4 of 2005. The company will shortly release sample silicon and boards to OEMs, ISVs and other partners.