ClearSpeed

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

ClearSpeed Technology, PLC is a corporation based in Bristol, England that sells Attached Processors (APs), or Coprocessors, as they are also called. These devices attach to computer processing nodes through the standard PC interface buses and are used to offload complex computational tasks. They have the dual advantage of higher peak computational performance and lower power consumption than typical processors from AMD and Intel. The processing boards attach to the host computer through either the older PCI bus or the newer, faster PCIe bus. Data is transferred from the host processors' memory to memory on the AP board for processing. ClearSpeed offers two models, a PCI version, the “Advance X620”, and the “Advance e620” for the PCIe bus.

Both products come with 1 GB (Gigabyte) of 500 MHz (Megahertz) DDR2 SDRAM. The SDRAM is configured with dual 64 bit data interfaces. The computational heart of the ClearSpeed AP is a chip called the CSX600. Each CSX600 is equipped with 96 compute engines, each of which has its own 32 or 64 bit floating point adder and multiplier. The arithmetic conforms to the IEEE 754 standard. The CSX600 and its memory interface are clocked at 210 MHz, and each of the 96 engines on the chip can perform a simultaneous add and multiply. Each engine also has 6KB of high-speed local storage to feed the dual floating point units. There are two CSX600 chips on each ClearSpeed AP, which yields a peak computational rate of (2 chips * 96 processors/chip * .210 GHz * 2 floating point operations (FLOPS) / Hz) 80.64 Gflops per attached processing board. As of Aug ’07 the ClearSpeed AP’s are the only attached processors in the marketplace that perform 64 bit arithmetic at their peak computational rate. This peak rate is achieved with a power consumption rated at less than 30W nominal for each AP. This is considerably lower than the power consumption of standard processors. The low power means that these boards can be added to existing computer nodes without changing the system cooling equipment or requirements.

The boards come with a set of software tools for programming. A C compiler with extensions (Cn) for the AP, assembler, debugger, execution profiler, and pre-written performance libraries for the Level 3 BLAS and LAPACK. There is no Fortran compiler at this time.

In December 2007, ClearSpeed announced that it would be shedding nearly 40% of its workforce (reducing headcount to 75) as a result of the slump in the financial industry; the targeted market had been for Monte Carlo simulations for the major investment houses - without this anticpated business, their marketing strategy required a massive overhaul.

The company has a US subsidiary, ClearSpeed Technology, Inc based in San Jose, CA.