FASTRA II Puts 13 GPUs In a Desktop Supercomputer

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."

Comments

Re:GPU accuracy

[Beardo the Bearded]

First, a gaming card is going to get fast firmware. A workstation card is going to get accurate firmware. I imagine that supercomputer cards would get specialized firmware. (I only skimmed the summary.)

GPUs are excellent at solving certain types of problems and excel at solving matrices. (That's what your video card is doing while it's rendering.) The best part of that is that most, if not all, mathematical problems can be expressed as a matrix, meaning that your super-fast GPU can solve most math problems super-fast.

Next, GPUs love working together since they don't care about what the OS is doing. All they do is take raw data and respond with an answer. Usually we're putting that answer onto the display, since otherwise wtf are we doing with a GPU? In this case, the results are returned instead of using the flashy display. So what you end up with is a set of really fast, specialized, parallel engines solving broken down matrices.

They're also not subject to the marketing whims of Moore's Law, so you can often get faster cards sooner than faster CPUs. To break down a supercomputer so that you get this kind of performance for 4000 EURO is a fantastic achievement. It's almost, but not quite, hobby range. (I'd still put money on someone trying to evolve this into a gaming rig...)