ClearSpeed Ships Advance Co-Processors in Giant Sun Supercomputer

Published: April 6, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Floating-point co-processor maker ClearSpeed has begun shipping the 360 Advance co-processors to Sun Microsystems to be included in the 50 teraflops supercomputer cluster that Sun, NEC, and AMD are building for the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

The three vendors won the big to build this machine last year, and it is comprised of 655 of Sun's future eight-socket "Galaxy" Opteron servers, some of them being equipped with ClearSpeed's Advance co-processors--360 of the Advance boards are used in the cluster, to be precise--and as the number of Opteron cores is doubled later on, Tokyo Tech plans to add another 240 Advance boards.

The Advance co-processors are based on a special parallel processor created by ClearSpeed called the CSX600, which is itself really a system on a chip. The CSX600 has a MultiThreaded Array Processor (MTAP), with 96 floating point cores, and a high-speed network connecting them to each other and to dedicated DDR2 main memory. These processors have 48-bit physical and 64-bit virtual and 32-bit actual memory addressing. ClearSpeed says that an Advance board can deliver 25 gigaflops of number-crunching performance and only consume 10 watts of power, which is simply incredible. The chip has hooks so C, C++, and Fortran applications can talk to it and make use of its accelerated math libraries. It is unclear how much of the 100 teraflops rating of the Tokyo Tech super will be due to the ClearSpeed boards, which plug into a PCI-X slot. If each CSX600 chip delivers 25 gigaflops of raw performance, and each PCI-X card has two chips (and a 25-watt power envelope including memory), and the final supercomputer will have 600 boards, that works out to 30 teraflops, or about 30 percent of the whole machine. The real question is why each Galaxy server in the cluster doesn't have lots of these boards. And maybe, after Tokyo Tech gets some experience in coding for these boards, it will add a lot more of them.