ClearSpeed Technology, a developer of high-performance, low-power, programmable co-processor solutions, today announced its first LINPACK benchmark score for its Advance accelerator board to coincide with the Supercomputing 2005 (SC05) conference in Seattle. The score of 30.2 Gigaflops (GFLOPS) was achieved in a mainstream dual processor workstation with a single ClearSpeed Advance accelerator board. The Advance board operates at a very low power dissipation of under 25 watts, weighs 9 oz. and achieved the Linpack score without program changes. The score appears at the Top500 Web site, in the "Performance of Various Computers Using Standard Linear Equations Software" report maintained by Professor Jack Dongarra, University of Tennessee. By itself, the workstation is capable of achieving a LINPACK score of 8 GFLOPS and has a power consumption of over 300 watts. Adding a single 25 watt Advance board yields an almost 4x improvement in performance, increasing the performance per watt ratio for the system considerably. In trials, the Advance board has also been shown to lower overall system power consumption at the same time as significantly increasing performance. As the dense linear algebra workload is undertaken on the power efficient accelerator board, the host CPU uses much less power, resulting in a reduction in the total system power consumption "The Advance board's performance results on the LINPACK benchmark represent ClearSpeed's potential in revolutionizing the HPC industry," said John Gustafson, ClearSpeed CTO of HPC. "Our performance per watt advantage allows us to exceed previous performance levels while addressing the problems of power consumption and heat dissipation." LINPACK is a collection of Fortran routines that analyze systems of linear equations such as those that arise in physics simulations and financial models. One routine in the collection has become the standard benchmark for measuring the performance of scientific computers and is most notably used by the Top 500 organization in ranking the world's 500 most powerful computer systems. While it is common to optimize the benchmark program for specific architectures, ClearSpeed achieved the 30.2 GFLOP score without changing a single line of the standard benchmark code. "ClearSpeed appears to be a very interesting technology for high performance with very low power consumption," said Jack Dongarra, maintainer of the LINPACK benchmark. ClearSpeed's announcement of 30.2 GFLOPS sustained on the LINPACK benchmark coincides with its presence at SC05, the premier international conference on high performance computing. In booth number 802 ClearSpeed will demonstrate its workstation LINPACK performance and power consumption. Additional demonstrations will show the Advance board in a variety of manufacturers systems, including those from Compusys, IBM and Sun Microsystems. It will also be present in a number of other booths, including those of AMD, Cray, IBM, Intel, NCSA and Sun Microsystems.