A SLENDER card that slides into a PC will more than double the speed of the world’s fastest supercomputing PC cluster while only fractionally increasing its power consumption.
The 30-centimetre booster card, called Advance, can also be used with high-end graphics or scientific PCs to quadruple their speed at certain heavy-duty calculations.
To speed up an ordinary chip with a single processing core, you have to make individual transistors switch much faster, which uses more power and produces far more waste heat. But the Advance card combines 96 processing cores on one chip, which means it can carry out 96 calculations in parallel. As well as allowing faster processing, this means individual transistors in the card do not have to switch as fast, so they consume a fraction of the power of a standard chip running at the same rate.
Advertisement
Last week, the card’s developer, ClearSpeed of San Jose in California, announced at the 2005 Supercomputing Conference in Seattle, Washington, that the cards will be used in the Tokyo Institute of Technology supercomputing PC cluster. Scheduled to be running by spring 2006, this will be capable of carrying out 100 trillion floating point operations per second (100 teraflops) – a milestone that has only been reached once before, by IBM’s 280-teraflop BlueGene/L system.
Clusters of ordinary computers make up 72 per cent of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world. Their off-the-shelf components mean they are inexpensive and can run almost any software. But as the size and computing power of these networks increases, the rooms that house them must be cooled by ever more expensive and complicated air conditioning, while their sheer weight can require reinforced floors.
Each of the Sun Microsystems servers in the Tokyo cluster will have a peak speed of 76.8 gigaflops and consume 700 watts. Each Advance card provides an extra 96 gigaflops at peak speed, but consumes just 25 watts.
