HEALTH

ClearSpeed acceleration chosen for its leading energy-efficient 64-bit performance: ClearSpeed Technology, the world leader in acceleration for high performance computing (HPC), announced that Warwick University's Digital Laboratory has selected ClearSpeed's Advance e620 accelerators to power its new Sun Microsystems cluster for developing extremely high-fidelity virtual environments. "Our team at Warwick Digital Lab is collaborating with ClearSpeed to enable interactive frame rates for high-fidelity, multi-sensory, 'there-reality' virtual environments for applications in healthcare, digital manufacturing, archaeology, and building design. To achieve this 'realism in real-time', we have selected the best in breed general purpose, 64-bit accelerators from ClearSpeed to complement our new Sun Microsystems high performance cluster," said Professor Alan Chalmers of the Warwick Digital Lab. The new cluster at the Warwick Digital Lab comprises 24 Sun Microsystems U40M2 workstations, each with two dual core AMD Opteron 2218 (2.6GHz) series processors, giving a theoretical 20.8 CPU-based GFLOPS per workstation. The Ultra 40 workstation is an ideal choice for this project because it allows significant expansion options. Under heavy use, the cluster is expected to use approximately 12KW of power. The cluster's 24 ClearSpeed Advance e620 accelerator boards each deliver an additional 80.64 GFLOPS of peak double precision performance, increasing the cluster's overall performance by more than 380% percent while adding less than 5% percent to the overall power consumption. At a system level, ClearSpeed acceleration increases the energy-efficiency (performance per watt) by four times. “Professor Chalmers and his team are at the cutting edge in the field of virtual environments, a critical enabler for the burgeoning virtual design industry. Warwick’s selection of ClearSpeed e620 accelerators is an excellent demonstration that ClearSpeed’s acceleration products provide real acceleration to meet the intense computing needs of the growing HPC market,” said Simon McIntosh-Smith, vice president of applications for ClearSpeed. “I am delighted that ClearSpeed’s 64-bit accelerators are helping to make Professor Chalmers’ vision a reality.”