ClearSpeed announced today that they’ve been awarded an order to supply X620 accelerators Tokyo Tech for use in its Molecular Dynamics Simulation Acceleration System known as TSUBAME.
“As a next stage in the increased quality of service to our HPC users at our GSIC center at Tokyo Tech., we are procuring additional ClearSpeed acceleration cards from Nissho Electronics,” said Professor Satoshi Matsuoka of the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center (GSIC) of Tokyo Tech. “This was a natural choice, given our prior experience as Asia’s #1 supercomputer TSUBAME, the world’s first accelerated system to make the Top 10 in the Top500 list. The new cards will also be hosted by TSUBAME alongside the originals, greatly increasing our real-world problem-solving abilities, in areas such as materials science and life sciences.”
…The capability of ClearSpeed’s boards to be installed and add performance, while making no difference to the size of the system and a minimal difference to its power consumption and cooling was important at the time of the initial order and equally important for this order.
They don’t yet have the release on their web site, but HPCwire has it.
[UPDATE] I spoke with a ClearSpeed spokesperson today about the size of this upgrade. Although they aren’t talking about the value, I was told that with this new purchase Tokyo Tech will have 1 Advance board per node in the system.
According to the spokesperson, the first sale included 360 ClearSpeed Advance boards which populated about half TSUBAME’s Sun x4600 servers and provided an additional 9 TFLOPS of performance.