ClearSpeed Advance Accelerator Boards Certified by Wolfram Research
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ClearSpeed Technology today announced that Wolfram Research's powerhouse Mathematica software has been certified for use with ClearSpeed Advance math accelerator boards on 64bit AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon-based platforms running Linux. At the Eighth International Mathematica Symposium (IMS'06) in Avignon, France, ClearSpeed demonstrated Mathematica computing double-precision general matrix-matrix multiply (DGEMM) operations at a 4.5x speedup compared with a non-accelerated system. Users and industry watchers alike have come to expect that Mathematica will be available and fully optimized for the latest hardware and operating environments, from workstations to supercomputers. Today's visionaries are pushing the next wave of high-performance computing (HPC) system architectures by deploying hybrid systems where a range of complementary technologies are combined to deliver the optimum match of overall system performance for their workloads while paying careful attention to the environmental and economic impact of those systems. Headquartered in Bristol, UK, and with U.S. offices in Calif., ClearSpeed Technology is a specialist semiconductor company focused on the design and development of microprocessors and boards that significantly increase performance for numerically-intensive applications. ClearSpeed's products provide application acceleration without significantly impacting power, cooling or space requirements, thus optimizing for the performance per Watt metrics which are rapidly becoming the dominant consideration in designing and deploying HPC systems. "Support of leading applications is an essential part of the wide scale adoption of any new technology," said Tom Beese, CEO for ClearSpeed. "Wolfram Research was first-to-market with all-platform 64-bit and multi-core support with Mathematica, which creates the perfect software foundation for ClearSpeed accelerator technology." At the heart of ClearSpeed's products lies the CSX600, an embedded parallel processor with 96 cores that executes up to 25 billion 64-bit floating-point operations per second (Flops) while consuming an average of 10 Watts of energy. It is the world's fastest and most power-efficient 64-bit floating point processor. The ClearSpeed Advance(TM) accelerator board combines two CSX600 processors in a PCI-X form factor that delivers up to 50 GFlops of sustained double-precision general matrix-matrix multiply (DGEMM) performance averaging less than 25W. The ClearSpeed Advance board plugs into industry standard workstations and servers without any modification. Microsoft Windows XP and Linux operating systems (Red Hat and SUSE) are supported. Drivers are currently available for x86 and x86-64 systems. "Mathematica's numerical computations are highly optimized," said Conrad Wolfram, director of strategic and international development. "Multiplying this by the speed-up from ClearSpeed's Advance accelerator brings unprecedented performance to the desktop; or to each node in a gridMathematica deployment. Supporting innovative hardware at the outset is important to our mission: Those at the frontiers of science and technology need support for frontier hardware."