Nvidia on Tuesday announced a personal supercomputer that delivers the computing power of a cluster at 1/100th of the price and in the form of a standard desktop workstation. It is working with partners to release the GPU-based Tesla Personal Supercomputer.
Supercomputers, shared resources that consume hundreds of kilowatts of power and cost millions of dollars to build and maintain, are typically used to carry out scientific research. Nvidia is bringing this power to the desktop.
The Tesla computers are available from a number of vendors, including Dell, Lenovo, Microway, Tycrid, Unitcom, Viglen and Western Scientific.
“We’ve all heard ‘desktop supercomputer’ claims in the past, but this time it’s for real,” said Burton Smith, a Microsoft technical fellow. “Nvidia and its partners will be delivering outstanding performance and broad applicability to the mainstream marketplace. Heterogeneous computing, where GPUs work in tandem with CPUs, is what makes such a breakthrough possible.”
Data-Intensive Desktops
At the heart of the personal supercomputer is the Tesla C1060 GPU Computing Processor, based on the Nvidia CUDA parallel-computing architecture. CUDA lets developers and researchers harness the massively parallel computational power of Tesla through industry standard C.
“GPUs have evolved to the point where many real-world applications are easily implemented on them and run significantly faster than on multi-core systems,” said Prof. Jack Dongarra, director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory at the University of Tennessee. “Future computing architectures will be hybrid systems with parallel-core GPUs working in tandem with multi-core CPUs.”
MIT, the Max Planck Institute, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Cambridge University, and others are actively advancing research using GPU-based personal supercomputers.
“GPU-based systems enable us to run life-science codes in minutes rather than the hours it took earlier,” said Jack Collins, manager of scientific computing and program development at the Advanced Biomedical Computing Center. “This exceptional speedup has the ability to…