NVIDIA Fermi for supercomputers unveiled today

NVIDIA introduced new Fermi based solutions for supercomputing at SC09 in Portland, Oregon. It's only an announcement though, the real hardware won't be available until Q2 2010. Additionally, the GPU maker also confirms that GeForce products based on Fermi will be available in Q1 2010.

The new Tesla 20-series GPUs promise to reduce the cost of supercomputing by a factor of 10. They feature support for the next generation IEEE 754-2008 double precision floating point standard, ECC, multi-level cache hierarchy with L1 and L2 cache, support for C++ programming language, up to 1 terabyte of memory, concurrent kernel execution, fast context switching, 10x faster atomic instructions, 64-bit virtual address space, system calls and recursive functions.

Designed from the ground-up for parallel computing, the NVIDIA® Tesla™ 20-series GPUs slash the cost of computing by delivering the same performance of a traditional CPU-based cluster at one-tenth the cost and one-twentieth the power.

The Tesla 20-series introduces features that enable many new applications to perform dramatically faster using GPU Computing. These include ray tracing, 3D cloud computing, video encoding, database search, data analytics, computer-aided engineering and virus scanning.

“NVIDIA has deployed a highly attractive architecture in Fermi, with a feature set that opens the technology up to the entire computing industry,” said Jack Dongarra, director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory at the University of Tennessee and co-author of LINPACK and LAPACK.

At their core, Tesla GPUs are based on the massively parallel CUDA computing architecture that offers developers a parallel computing model that is easier to understand and program than any of the alternatives developed over the last 50 years.

"There can be no doubt that the future of computing is parallel processing, and it is vital that computer science students get a solid grounding in how to program new parallel architectures," said Dr. Wen-mei Hwu, Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "GPUs and the CUDA programming model enable students to quickly understand parallel programming concepts and immediately get transformative speed increases."

The family of Tesla 20-series GPUs includes:

* Tesla C2050 & C2070 GPU Computing Processors
o Single GPU PCI-Express Gen-2 cards for workstation configurations
o Up to 3GB and 6GB (respectively) on-board GDDR5 memory
o Double precision performance in the range of 520GFlops - 630 GFlops * Tesla S2050 & S2070 GPU Computing Systems
o Four Tesla GPUs in a 1U system product for cluster and datacenter deployments
o Up to 12 GB and 24 GB (respectively) total system memory on board GDDR5 memory
o Double precision performance in the range of 2.1 TFlops - 2.5 TFlops

The Tesla C2050 and C2070 products will retail for $2,499 and $3,999 and the Tesla S2050 and S2070 will retail for $12,995 and $18,995. Products will be available in Q2 2010.