Product category:
Microprocessors, Microcontrollers and DSPs
News Release from: ClearSpeed Technology | Subject: CS301
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 24 November 2003
Multithreaded array processor works in
silicon
ClearSpeed Technology has demonstrated working silicon of its CS301 multithreaded array processor.
ClearSpeed Technology has demonstrated working silicon of its CS301 multithreaded array processor The fully programmable CS301 was demonstrated executing highly complex computational algorithms, running at the target clock speed of 200MHz while consuming under 2W, a fraction of the traditional power requirements
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 7 May 2007 at 8.00am (UK)
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The CS301 is being demonstrated using standard expansion slots within mainstream servers running Linux.
Mike Calise, President of ClearSpeed Technology said: "This milestone is significant because it follows just one month after the excitement which greeted our first announcement of the CS301 at the Microprocessor Forum on October 14th in San Jose.
This demonstration therefore shows not only the significant acceleration of an important application, but also confirms our October commitment to make this new chip available to our partners in Q4, 2003".
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Commenting on the ClearSpeed CS301, Will Strauss, Principal Analyst, Forward Concepts, commented: "ClearSpeed has a very well-thought-out architecture.
I'm pretty impressed.
I've seen lots of things like this over the years, but this breaks new ground".
The ClearSpeed CS301 was demonstrated driving a range of applications including drug docking, image processing and digital signal processing (DSP), requiring exceptionally high computing power.
The drug docking application developed by the Bristol University Biochemistry department, a leading body in the field of biomolecular recognition, was easily modified to benefit from the breakthrough performance level offered by the CS301.
The ability to program the CS301 in C allowed the application's inner loops to be quickly and easily ported to the CS301.
With the CS301, developers will be able to build complex drug simulations quickly and affordably, enabling companies to advance their development processes more rapidly then ever before.
"In life-sciences the need for massive computation has limited the development of accurate methods for modelling complex molecules and biological systems", said Bristol University Professor Anthony Clarke.
"ClearSpeed's technology promises a watershed in the application of computation to rational drug design, and can vastly accelerate our ability to test new drugs in-silico".
"The vision that drives our work is the excitement of knowing what can be achieved by others; of making high compute available to talented individuals and teams across the world", said Tom Beese, CEO, ClearSpeed Technology.
"We are thrilled that companies have moved so fast to show the impact of our technology.
Their applications show how enterprises and universities in a wide range of industries can now dramatically reduce the time and cost required to conduct research and advance their business".
The CS301 is based on a multithreaded array processing (MTAP) architecture and includes 64 processing elements, 384Kbyte of on-chip SRAM and I/O ports interconnecting through ClearSpeeds's ClearConnect bus.
Each processing element has its own floating point and integer 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.
The CS301 is manufactured on IBM's 0.13um process.
The CS301 can serve as a coprocessor alongside a general purpose processor from Intel, AMD, IBM or Motorola within a high performance workstation, blade server or cluster configuration for complex mathematically based applications such as, computational biology and drug discovery, digital content creation, nanotechnology development, scientific research and financial modelling.
It can also be used as a stand-alone processor for embedded DSP applications like radar pulse compression or image processing.
In applications where the CS301 is acting as a coprocessor, 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 faster and more power efficiently than anything else in the marketplace.
The ClearSpeed CS301 will be available to partners in Q4 2003, priced at $975 in volume.
The corporate development kit includes C compiler, graphical debugger, full suite of supporting tools and libraries, and board, and is available now, priced at $25,000.
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