ClearSpeed Software Environment

ClearSpeed Software Components

ClearSpeed's software is designed for developers who want to exploit significant data parallelism within their application. Within each software release there are two types of software packages: a Base package and Developer package (Software Development Kit- SDK). The Base package (free download) is required for using an Advance Card and includes directions for installing the driver, runtime and applications libraries. The Developer package ( requires a license) is for programmers developing code for the Advance product line. For specific details about what is included in the various software releases please click here to visit the ClearSpeed Support site.

For operating system (OS), library, system and application compatibility for each software release please click here.

Software Development for ClearSpeed Accelerated Systems

The development and optimization of applications for today’s multi-socket, multi-core systems is becoming an increasingly complex task compared with developing for the single processor systems that were prevalent throughout the industry until very recently. To remain productive in this challenging environment more sophisticated visual tools combined with familiar programming environments are essential.

When these multi-core industry standard systems also employ acceleration technologies based on specialized complementary coprocessor architectures, a developer has to get to grips with all aspects of the system, not just the individual elements. While the ability to focus on individual components is still vitally important, it is the interaction between all the different elements of the system that becomes the critical factor in developing highly efficient multi-threaded application code.

ClearSpeed's development tools have been specifically developed for heterogeneous architectures.

Click here for download information for the base or developer packages.

ClearSpeed Software Development Kit (SDK)

The ClearSpeed SDK aims to provide a full suite of professional software development tools built around an ANSI C-based cross compiler called Cn. It is designed to enable developers to write and debug code in order to port existing applications or develop new applications for the ClearSpeed Advance™ boards.

ClearSpeed Visual Profiler

The ClearSpeed Visual Profiler is part of the Developer package. For developers, the ClearSpeed Visual Profiler toolset provides insight at every level of the system including the interactions between multiple host processors and one or more ClearSpeed Advance accelerator boards. By delivering a consistent visual representation across the entire system, it provides the best possible environment in which to develop code that will perform optimally in today’s multi-core and heterogeneous accelerated systems.

Enabling ClearSpeed acceleration for many more applications

ClearSpeed's SDK and Visual Profiler allow many more applications to benefit from ClearSpeed acceleration by enabling:

Straight-forward porting of existing code using standard C libraries
Rapid development of applications using familiar C-based programming model and gdb debugger
Dependable outcomes by utilizing ClearSpeed simulation tools and performance profilers
Visual display of performance bottlenecks
Complete system coverage
Capture trace across the whole application
A standard view of different data sets

ClearSpeed CSXL and Runtime Libraries

Included in the purchase of the ClearSpeed Advance accelerator cards is a CD with runtime libraries and drivers for Linux and Microsoft Windows environments and the CSXL Library. CSXL accelerates a number of commonly used math functions from libraries such as MKL and ACML.