Enhancements boost high-performance accelerators

Enhancements to the Advance product familyof high-performance computing accelerators include improved software libraries, the Advance e620 PCI Express accelerator and the ClearSpeed Visual Profiler.

ClearSpeed Technology has announced new software and hardware enhancements to its Advance product family of high-performance computing accelerators.

The new offerings include enhancements to ClearSpeed CSXL software libraries, the Advance e620 PCI Express (PCIe) accelerator and the ClearSpeed Visual Profiler.

Benchmarks using these enhanced CSXL libraries deliver 20 times the performance per watt compared with industry standard servers when running the high performance Linpack Benchmark.

The new 2.50 release of ClearSpeed's CSXL acceleration libraries introduces native support for Microsoft Windows and simplifies deployment with documentation updates and end-user licence agreements.

It provides a number of performance enhancements to the core linear algebra routines for matrix multiplication.

Also included in the 2.50 release are the new ClearSpeed vector maths library and ClearSpeed random number generators that support additional capability such as Monte Carlo simulation for option pricing in the financial services industry.

Performance comparisons based on benchmark code for European Option pricing provided by a major international bank showed up to 20 times performance speedup using a ClearSpeed Advance accelerator compared with an industry server.

The use of multiple Advance accelerators in the system delivered up to 100 times performance speedup.

For scientific applications such as molecular modeling, recent results have demonstrated real-world application acceleration of between 3.4 to 9.4 times the speedup with Amber modules and 4.5 times the speedup with the Bristol University Docking Engine (BUDE) program.

On 27th April Cambridge Healthtech Institute's Bio-IT World announced that ClearSpeed Technology was one of three Best of Show finalists for the Information Technology Infrastructure category.

"Large consumers of compute power are looking for ways to improve both their system performance and performance per watt", says Steve Conway, Research Vice President of Technical Computing Systems at IDC.

"There is strong and increasing interest in acceleration technologies that could deliver improved performance without exceeding power, cooling and facilities constraints".

"ClearSpeed's acceleration technology is making advances in this area".

Building on the success of ClearSpeed's current PCI-X based Advance X620 accelerator, the introduction of the complementary and smaller form factor PCIe-based Advance e620 accelerator brings all the benefits of ClearSpeed's acceleration technology to the latest generation of multicore industry standard servers that incorporate the PCIe standard.

Together the existing Advance X620 and the Advance e620 significantly increase the number of server platforms that can take advantage of ClearSpeed acceleration.

For developers, the new ClearSpeed Visual Profiler toolset provides that insight at every level of the system, including the interactions between multiple host processors and one or more ClearSpeed Advance accelerator boards.

By delivering a consistent visual representation across the entire system, it provides a good environment in which to develop code that will perform optimally in today's multicore and heterogeneous accelerated systems.

"The world's leading financial institutions and research organisations that depend upon the availability of compute power to maintain their competitive edge are struggling with the constraints of facilities space, power and cooling", says Stephen McKinnon, ClearSpeed's Chief Operating Officer.

"The enhancements to our product family are delivering three, five or even twenty times the application performance of unaccelerated systems, while adding less than 5% to the total energy bill".

"Acceleration technology is causing a radical rethink of data-centre design".

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