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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."

3 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. Easy money to be made? by Darkness404 · · Score: 0, Redundant

    It sounds like there might be easy money to be made buying these components, putting them in a computer case and then reselling them for profit at various universities. Just wait for the "Dell" of supercomputers.

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    1. Re:Easy money to be made? by LordKaT · · Score: 0, Redundant

      7 graphics cards. Plus 4 power supplies.

      Methink "easy" in the GP's context means "easier than building a supercomputer from the ground up like IBM currently does"

  2. Yeah but... by definate · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Can it play Crysis with a high frame rate on maximum?

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