ClearSpeed, the Bristol-based computer accelerator specialist, has multiple boards in South Africa’s first supercomputer.

The Clearspeed Advance Accelerator boards give a five to ten times boost to the performance of the $1.4m IBM supercomputer supplied to South Africa’s Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC), and funded by the South African Department of Science and Technology.

See also Clearspeed gives supercomputer 24% boost.

“Academic systems running compute-intensive applications have strict requirements for precision, reliability and accuracy,” said Stephen McKinnon, ClearSpeed’s COO, “this is the environment where ClearSpeed’s technology provides unparalleled performance advantages.”

Each of the Advance boards is capable of over 50 GFLOPS of sustained double precision matrix multiplication operations while averaging only 25W power dissipation, approximately four times the performance per watt of today’s best industry standard processors.

The supercomputer will be used to address issues such as poverty reduction, HIV/AIDS vaccine development and biotechnology. The planned application disciplines include bioinformatics, aerospace, material sciences, geosciences and other large-scale modelling and simulation activities which will be accessible to academics and organizations throughout the scientific community in South Africa.

The CHPC is a division of the Meraka Institute, a national research centre of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).