NVIDIA and OEMs to launch personal supercomputer

Theo Valich talks about GPU supercomputing and reports NVIDIA has assembled quite a lot of OEMs and system integrators to launch a Tesla-based personal supercomputer. NVIDIA has unveiled this Tesla Personal Supercomputer at SC08.

It's an Intel or AMD powered system with quad-core processors, more than 4GB of memory, at least four NVIDIA Tesla C1060 cards and more than 4 teraFLOPS single precision and 560 gigaFLOPS dual precision computing power. Valich says we can expect these systems next year from ASUS, Dell, Lenovo, Scan, and many others.

The company assembled quite a lot of OEMs and system integrators, such as ASUS, Dell, Lenovo, Scan and many others - all in a bid to jump-start revenue coming from the Tesla product line-up. In a conference call for Q2Œ08 results, Jen-Hsun stated that Q2Œ09 will see impact from Tesla line-up, and my personal take is that this product could be a surprising success.

The reason for it is quite simple: unlike companies that are advertising personal supercomputers and charging them tens of thousand dollars (Cray CX1 and Tyan PSC come to mind) - Nvidia is targeting a price of less than 9,999.99 USD. Yep, thatfs correct, 4+ TFLOPS supercomputer for less than 10 grand.

At the time of writing, I havenft been able to found are those Tesla cards using older 65nm or new, power-saving 55nm chips. If we would judge by chips that power new Quadros, 55nm should be under the hood, but then again, Nvidia has a large nVentory of older 65nm chips, so the company might be inclined to clean them out.