ClearSpeed Technology, the Bristol co-processor company which works with Intel and AMD to soup up their processors performance, has had its technology adopted by the world’s ninth fastest supercomputer.

"Tokyo Tech GSIC worked with ClearSpeed to achieve a 9 TeraFLOPS increase in performance from our previous result, with very little addition to power requirements and no overhead in space," said Professor Satoshi Matsuoka of the Global Scientific Information and Computing Centre (GSIC) of Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) which built the supercomputer which it calls TSUBAME.

The ClearSpeed accelerated result of 47 TeraFLOPS is a 24 per cent performance boost from the non-accelerated performance of 38 TeraFLOPS.

The increased performance is delivered with only a one percent increase in energy consumption. Tokyo Tech has estimated that the TSUBAME’s architecture will save them up to a $1m per year in combined facilities and energy costs, amounting to a reduction of between 10 and 20 per cent of the system’s total cost of ownership.

"From this point forward, mainstream HPTC systems will be architected by combining industry standard-platforms with purpose-designed acceleration technology," said Stephen McKinnon, ClearSpeed’s COO, "ClearSpeed is paving the way for a new era of energy-efficient high performance and technical computing."