Warwick adopts ClearSpeed tech for rendering in virtual environments

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ClearSpeed announced this week that Warwick University’s Digital Laboratory is using its gear in a Sun cluster for rendering

“Our team at Warwick Digital Lab is collaborating with ClearSpeed to enable interactive frame rates for high-fidelity, multi-sensory, ‘there-reality’ virtual environments for applications in healthcare, digital manufacturing, archaeology, and building design. To achieve this ‘realism in real-time’, we have selected the best in breed general purpose, 64-bit accelerators from ClearSpeed to complement our new Sun Microsystems high performance cluster,” said Professor Alan Chalmers of the Warwick Digital Lab.

Since many of you are gear people, here are some specs

The new cluster at the Warwick Digital Lab comprises 24 Sun Microsystems U40M2 workstations, each with two dual core AMD Opteron 2218 (2.6GHz) series processors, giving a theoretical 20.8 CPU-based GFLOPS per workstation. …The cluster’s 24 ClearSpeed Advance e620 accelerator boards each deliver an additional 80.64 GFLOPS of peak double precision performance, increasing the cluster’s overall performance by more than 380% percent while adding less than 5% percent to the overall power consumption.