Monday, May 5, 2008

Tensilica, Lawrence Berkeley Labs Team On HPC

Santa Clara-based Tensilica and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory said today that the two are collaborating on a program to explore new design concepts for energy-efficient, high performance scientific computer systems. The firms said they will look to use a large number of small processor cores to create highly parallel systems for climate modeling. According to the firms, climate modeling requires 100 to 1000 times higher computation throughput than existing systems, and require so much electricity to be cost prohibitive. Financial impact of the deal was not disclosed. Tensilica is a provider of low power, systems-on-a-chip processor cores; the firm is venture backed by Altera Corporation, Cisco Systems, Conexant Systems, Foundation Capital, Matsushita Electric Industries, Meritech Capital Partners, NEC, Oak Investment Partners and Worldview Technology Partners.