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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Breaking News -
Platforms:
ClearSpeed Announces CS301
Multi-Threaded Array Processor
ClearSpeed Technology, a leading provider of high performance, low power
chip-based solutions, announced the ClearSpeed CS301, a multi-threaded array
processor that enables dramatic improvements in performance and power
consumption for intensive floating point applications. At over 25 GFLOPS peak
performance, the new chip provides more than twice the processing speed of
competitive products. At 10 GFLOPS per Watt, power consumption is also 20
times more efficient. As a result, the CS301 delivers up to a ninety percent
reduction in purchase price and running costs, making high performance
computing affordable and available to companies of all sizes.
"With conventional processor design, increasing performance has tended to
come
with real penalties in power consumption and heat dissipation, to the point
where computing cannot keep up with the demands of today's emerging
applications and rapidly increasing volumes of data," said Tom Beese, CEO of
ClearSpeed Technology. "The CS301 is designed specifically to meet those needs
with high performance, power efficiency and full programmability in C combined
into a single chip. The CS301 is the first in a family of ClearSpeed
microprocessors that we believe will challenge present day thinking by
creating a world where scientists, bio-informaticians, engineers and content
creators alike can have access to high performance computing anywhere,
anytime."
The CS301 is based on a multi-threaded array processing (MTAP) architecture
and includes 64 processing elements, 384KB of on-chip SRAM and I/O ports
interconnecting through ClearSpeed's ClearConnect bus. Each processing element
has its own floating point units, local memory and I/O capability, making the
CS301 ideally suited for applications which have high processing or bandwidth
requirements. The ClearConnect bus is a packet switched network that provides
high bandwidth and low power consumption, supporting multiple concurrent
transfers giving even higher aggregate bandwidth.
As a result, complex mathematically based applications such as,
computational
biology and drug discovery, digital content creation, nanotechnology
development, scientific research and financial modelling can now be executed
in a fraction of the time.
"We are gratified to see the immediate high level of interest displayed by
OEM's in the overall system improvements enabled by the CS301," said Mike
Calise, president of ClearSpeed U.S. "The dual benefit of performance and
efficiency is empowering companies to accelerate existing applications as well
as inspiring them to explore new applications that were previously
inaccessible."
The CS301 can serve either as a co-processor alongside an Intel or AMD CPU
within a high performance workstation, blade server or cluster configuration,
or as a standalone processor for embedded DSP applications like radar pulse
compression or image processing. In applications where the CS301 is acting as
a co-processor, dynamic libraries offload an application's inner loops to the
CS301. Although these inner loops only make up a small portion of the source
code, these loops are responsible for the vast majority of the application's
running time. By offloading the inner loops, the CS301 can bypass the
traditional bottleneck caused by a CPU's limited mathematical capability,
executing the core of the application more than twice as fast as anything else
in the marketplace.
"To deliver such high levels of performance with full programmability and
outstanding gains in power efficiency is a very significant achievement," said
Chris Piercy, president and chairman of the Northern California Nanotechnology
Initiative. "We believe this technology will accelerate the development of
nanotechnology and its applications across various industries by making high
performance computing more accessible and scalable than ever before."
The ClearSpeed CS301 is fully programmable in high-level languages and its
software development kit is available now with a C compiler, graphical
debugger and a full suite of supporting tools and libraries.
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