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Clearspeed Cuts Power Consumption of 360GFLOPS Computer

By Richard Wilson -- Electronics Weekly, 9/4/2006

Clearspeed Technology has seen its high performance computing accelerator boards power efficient processing results in recent Linpack benchmark tests.

The Bristol, England-based co-processor system specialist said its Advance accelerator boards rated at a power consumption of 25W per board added 28.5GigaFLOPS (GFLOPS) each to a cluster of Hewlett Packard Proliant DL380 G5 servers running the Linpack benchmark.

With two Advance accelerator boards in each of the four servers, the cluster performance was increased to more than 364 GFLOPS while adding only 200W to the overall power levels.

"Consuming no more power than it takes to turn on the lights in a normal living room, we have increased the performance of the cluster more than two and a half times," said John Gustafson, Clearspeed CTO for HPC.

Without acceleration, the four node cluster delivered 136GFLOPS from its eight Intel Xeon 5160 (Woodcrest) dual core processors while consuming 1.9kW of power. 

The ClearSpeed accelerated cluster completed the Linpack benchmark run in just 18.4 minutes while using only 40 percent of the energy required by the non-accelerated cluster, which took 48.4 minutes to finish.

Electronics Weekly is the London-based sister publication of Electronic News.