LBNL and Tensilica Collaborate on Energy Efficient HPC

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Tensilica and LBNL have announced a collaboration project directed at exploring new design concepts for energy-efficient high performance computing solutions. The effort will focus on utilizing a large number of small processing cores interconnected with highly efficient, optimized links. One of the main drivers for the project is climate modeling. [Chris Kerr is routinely using the lion’s share of LBNL’s current compute].

Our studies show that energy costs make current approaches for supercomputing unsustainable,” stated Horst Simon, Associate Laboratory Director, Computing Sciences for Berkeley Lab. “Hardware-software co-design using tiny processor cores, such as those made by Tensilica, holds great promise for systems that reduce power costs and increase practical system scale. Such processors, by their nature, must deliver maximum performance while consuming minimal power – exactly the challenge facing the high performance computing community. One of the most compute-intensive applications is modeling global climate change, a critical research application and the perfect pilot application for energy-efficient computing optimization.”

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