Bristol, UK – August 31, 2006 - ClearSpeed Technology (LSE:CSD), the leader in double precision coprocessor acceleration technology, today announced Linpack benchmark results that set new standards for energy efficient computation for high performance computing (HPC) clusters.

ClearSpeed Advance™ accelerator boards rated at only 25 Watts power consumption per board added 28.5 GigaFLOPS (GFLOPS) each to a cluster of Hewlett Packard Proliant DL380 G5 servers running the high performance Linpack benchmark. With two Advance accelerator boards in each of the four servers, the cluster performance was increased to over 364 GFLOPS while adding only 200 Watts to the overall power levels. Without ClearSpeed acceleration, the four node cluster delivered 136 GFLOPS from its 8 Intel® Xeon® 5160 (Woodcrest) dual core processors while consuming 1,940 Watts of power. A similarly configured single node delivered 90 GFLOPS compared with 34 GFLOPS for the non-accelerated system. The ClearSpeed accelerated cluster completed the Linpack benchmark run in just 18.4 minutes while using only 40% of the energy required by the non-accelerated cluster which took 48.4 minutes to finish.

“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 chief technical officer for HPC. “With the additional Linpack performance exceeding one GFLOP per Watt and almost perfect scaling, we have demonstrated that ClearSpeed accelerator technology can combine unmatched performance with the economic benefits of reduced energy consumption for HPC clusters.”

To put these results in context, the performance delivered by the ClearSpeed accelerated four node HP cluster, (a total of 16 CPU cores), is equivalent to the number one Top500 (www.top500.org) installation from November 1996 which was a massive 2048 CPU Hitachi ystem at the Center For Computational Science at the University Of Tsukuba in Japan that delivered 368.2 GFLOPS. Even more impressively, the test cluster is contained in a half populated 14U rack and can operate in a standard office environment.

Note: Previously published Linpack results for similar single node systems were 34.9 GFLOPS for the standard node and 93 GFLOPS for an accelerated node with two ClearSpeed Advance boards. The variations are a result of small differences between system configurations and problem sizes used during the benchmark runs.