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Australia's CSIRO To Launch CPU-GPU Supercomputer
bennyboy64 contributes this excerpt from CRN Australia: "The CSIRO will this week launch a new supercomputer which uses a cluster of GPUs [pictures] to gain a processing capacity that competes with supercomputers over twice its size.
The supercomputer is one of the world's first to combine traditional CPUs with the more powerful GPUs.
It features 100 Intel Xeon CPU chips and 50 Tesla GPU chips, connected to an 80 Terabyte Hitachi Data Systems network attached storage unit. CSIRO science applications have already seen 10-100x speedups on NVIDIA GPUs."
Okay, that's not quite true, most tasks benefit from piddling about on the CPU, but demanding tasks would be better off running on something faster and more specialised. The barrier to that is that it's harder to write GPGPU code.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I can take a stab; GPUs traditionally render graphics, good at processing vectors and mathsy things. Now think of a simulation of a bunch of atoms, the forces between the atoms are often approximated to Newtonian laws of motion for computational efficiency reasons, this is especially important when dealing with tens of thousands of atoms - called Molecular Dynamics (MD). So the same maths used for graphic intensive computer games is the same as classical MD. The problem hither to is that MD software has never really been compiled for GPU architecture, just Athlons and Pentiums.
I should mention that I use the CSIRO CPU cluster, it's quite good already, but I'm still waiting weeks to simulate a microsecond of 10,000 atoms using 32 processors. My new side project will be trying it out on the GPUs. 100x faster they reckon, that'll be a game changer for me
The main drawback of using GPUs for scientific applications is their poor support for double precision floating point operations.
Using single precision mathematics makes sense for games, where it doesn't matter if a triangle is a few millimetres out of place or the shade of a pixel is slightly wrong. However, in a lot of scientific applications these small errors can build up and completely invalidate results.
There are rumours that Nvidias next generation Fermi GPU will support double precision mathematics at the same speed as single precision. If this is the case then they will be incredibly popular within the scientific community and I would expect the top500 supercomputer list will become dominated by machines built around GPUs rather then traditional CPUs. (Of course this is really dependant on the Fermi GPUs FLOPS per Watt performance which is impossible to gauge before they are released).
Hmmm.... is this setup a realisation of this release from Nvidia in March
Nvidia Touts New GPU Supercomputer
http://gigaom.com/2009/05/04/nvidia-touts-new-gpu-supercomputer/
Another 'standalone' GPGPU supercomputer, without the Infiniband switch
University of Antwerp makes 4000EUR NVIDIA supercomputer
http://www.dvhardware.net/article27538.html