ClearSpeed Technology Teams with IBM to Deliver Hybrid Clusters

SPECIAL COVERAGE FROM ISC2006-- ClearSpeed Technology, a leader in high-performance coprocessors and member of Blade.orgtoday announced it will team with IBM to deliver advanced technology for the world's most powerful supercomputer installations by integrating ClearSpeed Advance boards into the IBM System Cluster 1350 solution. ClearSpeed is an industry leader in the emerging market for energy efficient math library accelerators. "IBM's selection of ClearSpeed validates the inclusion of coprocessor technology as a key component in the next wave of high performance computing (HPC) architectures," said Tom Beese, CEO for ClearSpeed. "Our expanded relationship with IBM broadens the worldwide availability of the ClearSpeed Advance boards beyond Top 500-class systems to include the wider community of HPC customers looking to increase their system's floating-point performance without substantially impacting their energy or facilities costs." At the heart of ClearSpeed's products lies the CSX600, an embedded parallel processor with 96 cores that executes up to 25 billion 64-bit floating point operations per second (Flops) while consuming less than 10 Watts of energy. It is the world's fastest and most power-efficient 64-bit floating point processor. The ClearSpeed 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. The combination of the ClearSpeed Advance accelerator boards and the IBM System Cluster 1350 is a fully tested, highly scalable solution for research as well as finance, oil and gas, life sciences and other production oriented HPC markets, and will be available in the second half of 2006. The technologies from IBM and ClearSpeed are components of the recently announced advanced supercomputer architecture that the University of Bristol has designed to consolidate its position as one of the world's top HPC centers. This exciting new facility will help to maintain the university's lead in delivering groundbreaking research. "IBM is constantly striving to bring the best and most advanced technologies to market," said Wendy McGee, director, IBM Cluster Solutions. "By teaming with select specialist suppliers like ClearSpeed, we can enhance our ability to supply systems that enable our customers to deliver breakthrough research and to strengthen their competitive position in the global marketplace."