Acceleration Technology
Advance accelerators
ClearSpeed's Advance e710 and e20 accelerators provide application acceleration without impacting power, cooling or space requirements. In a PCI form factor one or more boards can be easily added to a workstation or server. And because it operates at the standard math library level, application users see only the performance gain with none of the hassle of changing their code.
How it works
The Advance board works by offloading compute-intensive math library routines called by applications running on the host processor.
When a call is made by an application to a ClearSpeed supported standard math library, it is intercepted by CSXL, ClearSpeed's accelerated math library, which calculates if the function call is worth off-loading. When it is, the CSXL transfers the required data to the board to compute the function. The answer is calculated on the board and the results read back into host memory before returning to the application.
Throughout this process, the only perceivable difference between a function running on the host system, or a function running on the Advance board, is the speed. The acceleration is transparent to the end user and the application.
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Supporting Software
The board is provided with supporting software in the form of standard software libraries used in a variety of applications. As well as standard libraries and application software, the Advance cards are supported by ClearSpeed's Software Development Kit (SDK).