Customer Case Studies : Jungo / ClearSpeed

ClearSpeed Technology is a fabless semiconductor company focused on the design and development of microprocessors and related products that offer significant increases in the performance of computing systems at lower power.

ClearSpeed's processors have been designed for use in applications that are data-parallel in nature. Such data-parallel problems are found in many different application areas especially High Performance Compute (HPC), engineering and scientific applications.

The Advance™ accelerator board has two of ClearSpeed’s CSX600 processors, DRAM and a PCI-X interface. This can be used to accelerate math-intensive applications by offloading the processing to standard math libraries running on the Advance board. To do this, data is transferred to the accelerator board where it is processed by the CSX600 processors and the results are then returned to the host processor.

As well as standard application libraries such as BLAS, LAPACK and FFT, ClearSpeed provides a full set of development tools based around an optimizing C compiler and the industry-standard gdb debugger.

In order to take full advantage of the 64-bit architectures that dominate the target application areas of HPC and scientific computation, ClearSpeed required driver solutions to access its Advance PCI-X based board. ClearSpeed requested that Jungo port its leading WinDriver toolkit to support the 64-bit architecture as well, allowing ClearSpeed to use the same driver code on both Linux and Windows and on both 32-bit and 64-bit systems.

Jungo offers its Professional Services Team to add custom features to the WinDriver toolkit and integrate the WinDriver kernel module into additional environments. With extensive knowledge in operating systems and driver development Jungo’s team was executed to conduct the integration and completed the project within a month time of development.

“The WinDriver provides a cross platform PCI driver stack for both Windows and Linux platforms” said Con Bradley from ClearSpeed Technology who chose WinDriver as the foundation for the CSX600 drivers, “being also able to develop the drivers in user space was a big advantage as it was much easier to debug the drivers. Also driver bugs were less likely to cause a kernel crash.”

The WinDriver allowed ClearSpeed to focus on its core expertise and let Jungo handle the OS internals. Jungo’s mature and rigorously tested kernel module could be used with the same API on multiple OSs and CPU architecture.

The WinDriver API was used to map the address spaces on the CSX600 card, handle interrupts and perform DMA.

Performance was a critical issue within the ClearSpeed design, as the Advance accelerator board is geared to accelerate data computations. ClearSpeed required very high DMA performance and were able to achieve this by using the WinDriver Kernel Module although accessing it from a user level application. Using the WinDriver advance DMA API, ClearSpeed was able to interface the DMA locking functions and set up a raw I/O DMA mechanism between the Advance accelerator board and the user level buffers within the application. WinDriver’s optimized kernel module was able to supply the performance required by the ClearSpeed environment.

Using a single ClearSpeed Advance board, the performance of a Dual Opteron, IBM A Pro e-Server was increased from just over 8 GFLOPS to a breathtaking 32.2 GFLOPS while actually decreasing the energy consumption. This why the Tokyo Institute of Technology selected ClearSpeed for its new Sun based supercomputer which is planned to be one of the top ten largest super computers in the world.

For more information visit: www.clearspeed.com.

About ClearSpeed™

Established in 1997, ClearSpeed Technology is a semiconductor company focused on delivering high performance co-processors to be used alongside general purpose processors in the world’s most compute-intensive applications. ClearSpeed’s advanced multi-threaded array processing technology provides the ability to significantly accelerate data-intensive applications at extremely low power. Products include chips, boards, software tools, applications and support. ClearSpeed has offices in San Jose, Calif. and Bristol, UK and has over 40 patents granted and pending.

About WinDriver™

Jungo's WinDriver™ automates and simplifies the development of user mode device drivers and applications for USB / PCI / PCI Express / CardBus / ISA / PCMCIA / PCI-X / and CompactPCI under Windows 2000/XP/XP Embedded/ Server 2003, Windows CE, Linux, Solaris and VxWorks. WinDriver provides a complete solution for creating high performance drivers and custom hardware access applications, thereby enabling device manufacturers to focus on their driver's added-value functionality, instead of on operating system internals and the DDK. Enhanced Built-in support is available for Actel, Altera, Atmel, Cypress, National Semiconductor, PLDA, PLX, Microchip, Netchip, QuickLogic, Silicon Laboratories, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Xilinx.

About Jungo

Jungo Software Technologies is a leading supplier of driver development tools, hardware access applications, embedded USB software solutions and residential gateway software. Jungo has partnered with leading operating system and silicon vendors to provide the best solutions to software and hardware developers. Jungo is a privately held company with corporate offices in San Jose, California, sales and support offices in Taipei, Texas and London and an R&D center in Israel. Founded in 1998, Jungo's investors include Conexant Systems, Infineon Ventures, Intel Communications Fund, Partech International and TeleSoft Partners.

For further details visit www.jungo.com
or contact sales@jungo.com for pricing and availability.

Jungo Sales Department:
Phone: 1-877-514-0537 (USA) or +972-74-721-2223 (Worldwide)
Fax: 972-74-721-2122
Email: sales@jungo.com

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Jungo / ClearSpeed Application Story