Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Tensilica Collaborate

Tensilica and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory today announced a collaboration program to explore new design concepts for energy-efficient high-performance scientific computer systems. The joint effort is focused on novel processor and systems architectures using large numbers of small processor cores, connected together with optimized links, and tuned to the requirements of highly-parallel applications such as climate modeling. These demanding scientific problems require 100 to 1000 times higher computation throughput than today’s high-end computing installations, but conventional systems require so much electricity, generate so much heat, and require such complex physical installations that the costs would be prohibitive. This collaboration in application-directed supercomputing aims at making “exascale systems” (up to 1018 floating point operations per second) feasible and cost-effective.
For more information, see http://www.tensilica.com/news_events/pr_2008_05_05.htm