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FASTRA II Puts 13 GPUs In a Desktop Supercomputer

Posted by timothy on from the lucky-number dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Last year tomography researchers of the ASTRA group at the University of Antwerp developed a desktop supercomputer with four NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics cards. The performance of the FASTRA GPGPU system was amazing; it was slightly faster than the university's 512-core supercomputer and cost less than 4000EUR. Today the researchers announce FASTRA II, a new 6000EUR GPGPU computing beast with six dual-GPU NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 graphics cards and one GeForce GTX 275. The development of the new system was more complicated and there are still some stability issues, but tests reveal the 13 GPUs deliver 3.75x more performance than the old system. For the tomography reconstruction calculations these researchers need to do, the compact FASTRA II is four times faster than the university's supercomputer cluster, while being roughly 300 times more energy efficient."

6 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. Awesome by enderjsv · · Score: 5, Funny

    Almost meets the minimum requirements for Crysis 2

    1. Re:Awesome by sadness203 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Only if you imagine a beowolf cluster of these
      Here goes the redundant and offtopic mod.

  2. More Awesome by copponex · · Score: 3, Funny

    This was post #2 and already modded -1, Redundant.

    1. Re:More Awesome by joocemann · · Score: 3, Funny

      slashdot mods are often, as I observe, sour and pissy skeptics. even if it is humorous to them they will knock it for lack of something else to bash.

  3. Re:Easy money to be made? by daVinci1980 · · Score: 3, Funny

    You must be new here... ;)

    --
    I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
  4. times less by Tubal-Cain · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...consuming 300 times less power.

    *sigh*