From modelling climate change to solving complex mathematical problems, supercomputers have potential to tackle some of the world’s biggest challenges.
Yet their large size and energy consumption means they are costly to run and contribute to global warming.
Now a specialist semiconductor company based in Bristol, England is helping the world’s most powerful computers to run faster and more efficiently.
Only six years after its launch, ClearSpeed Technology has become widely recognised as a global leader in acceleration technology.
More speed, less power
ClearSpeed designs high-performance accelerators that work alongside conventional computer processing units (CPUs) in the world’s most demanding applications.
Its advanced technologies offer higher computing speeds than the most powerful CPUs but use far less power.
The Tokyo Institute of Technology has already installed 360 of ClearSpeed’s Advance accelerator boards in its own supercomputer.
Five years ago we saw that high-performance computers delivering high efficiency were going to become very important for many industries.
Tom Beese
CEO
Clearspeed
This enables it to make more than 47 trillion calculations a second – the equivalent of the world’s population working simultaneously on handheld calculators for 16 hours.
The technology raised the supercomputer’s performance by 24 per cent while increasing power consumption by only one per cent.
At the forefront of chip design
South West England, where ClearSpeed’s UK R&D base is located, is home to Europe's largest concentration of silicon designers, second only to the USA globally.
With access to specialist university research facilities and situated among some of the world’s most innovative firms, ClearSpeed is well-placed to develop the silicon chips at the heart of its technology.
Each of the firm’s CSX600 chips contains 96 processor cores that work in parallel to solve complex mathematical problems.
A single chip can perform more than 37.5 billion high-precision calculations per second while typically using fewer than 10 watts of power.
“One key to our current success is that five years ago we saw that high-performance computers delivering high efficiency were going to become very important for many industries,” explains Tom Beese, ClearSpeed’s chief executive officer.
“We were able to put together a team to meet that need.”
Climatology applications
ClearSpeed’s technology could even prove vital in helping to map and respond to climate change.
Working as part of a consortium with IBM and ClusterVision, the firm is installing three supercomputers that will be used for climatology studies at the University of Bristol.
“These high-performance computers will allow us to develop a new generation of numerical models that have a much more sophisticated representation of the climate system,” says Bristol University climatologist Professor Paul Valdes.
Generating competitive advantage with your R&D
What makes the UK a good place for firms such as ClearSpeed to undertake research in cutting-edge fields? The commercial advantages of undertaking research in the UK are explored in this brochure.
“This will give everyone much greater confidence in the regional predictions of future climate change,” he explains.
Meeting complex trading requirements
Away from the world of supercomputers, experts in fields such as finance market trading, drug discovery, engineering and exploration are also demanding higher-speed computing at lower costs.
ClearSpeed recently launched its first off-the-shelf technology for the financial services industry with partners IBM and AMD.
The firm’s Advance accelerator boards enable such institutions running complex analytical and trading programmes to gain higher performance while saving on power and space requirements.
“ClearSpeed is leading the way towards energy-efficient computing in the most demanding markets,” says Beese.
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