NVIDIA Tesla - GPU supercomputing

Posted on Thursday, June 21 2007 @ 14:54 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
NVIDIA unveiled its new Tesla platform, a GPU-based supercomputing solution. The firm says this technology will be useful for fields like the geosciences, molecular biology, and medical diagnostics enable discoveries that transform billions of lives every day. Universities, research institutions, and companies in these and other fields face a daunting challenge: as their simulation models become exponentially complex, so does their need for vast computational resources.

The firm claims the NVIDIA Tesla will put supercomputing power into the hands of every scientist and engineer: "Today's workstations will be transformed into personal supercomputers."

The NVIDIA Tesla family includes:
  • NVIDIA Tesla GPU Computing Processor, a dedicated computing board that scales to multiple Tesla GPUs inside a single PC or workstation. The Tesla GPU features 128 parallel processors, and delivers up to 518 gigaflops of parallel computation. The GPU Computing processor can be used in existing systems partnered with high-performance CPUs.

  • NVIDIA Tesla Deskside Supercomputer, a scalable computing system that includes two NVIDIA Tesla GPUs and attaches to a PC or workstation through an industry-standard PCI-Express connection. With multiple deskside systems, a standard PC or workstation is transformed into a personal supercomputer, delivering up to 8 teraflops of compute power to the desktop.

  • NVIDIA Tesla GPU Computing Server, a 1U server housing up to eight NVIDIA Tesla GPUs, containing more than 1000 parallel processors that add teraflops of parallel processing to clusters. The Tesla GPU Server is the first server system of its kind to bring GPU computing to the datacenter.
  • And some quotes from enthusiastic scientists:
    Many of the molecular structures we analyze are so large that they can take weeks of processing time to run the calculations required for their physical simulation," said John Stone, senior research programmer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. "NVIDIA's GPU computing technology has given us a 100-fold increase in some of our programs, and this is on desktop machines where previously we would have had to run these calculations to a cluster. NVIDIA Tesla promises to take this forward with more flexible computing solutions."

    "Geophysical and seismic analysis has historically been a batch process that takes many, many hours," said Steve Briggs, vice president of systems integration at Headwave, a Houston-based geophysical visualization company. "Without inventions like Tesla and CUDA GPU computing technology, discoveries like Jack Field, where a large oil reserve was detected 27,000 feet beneath the Gulf of Mexico, simply would never have been found. NVIDIA's announcement today is going to make discoveries of this and even larger magnitude more possible."

    "Running electromagnetic simulations using NVIDIA's compute hardware accelerates processing times by factors of 25 or more—applying a level of complexity to the analysis and optimization of medical products which nobody dreamed of, even two years ago," said Ryan Schneider, CTO of Acceleware Corporation. "NVIDIA and Acceleware's solutions have opened completely new worlds for computational electromagnetics."


    About the Author

    Thomas De Maesschalck

    Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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