University of Antwerp makes 4000EUR NVIDIA supercomputer

[Zxian]

Researchers at the University of Antwerp in Belgium have created a new supercomputer with standard gaming hardware. The system uses four NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics cards, it costs less than 4000EUR to build and thanks to NVIDIA's CUDA technology it delivers roughly the same performance as a supercomputer cluster consisting of hundreds of PCs!

This new system is used by the ASTRA research group, part of the Vision Lab of the University of Antwerp, to develop new computational methods for tomography. The guys explain the eight NVIDIA GPUs deliver the same performance for their work as more than 300 Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz processors. On a normal desktop PC their tomography tasks would take several weeks but on this NVIDIA-based "supercomputer" it only takes a couple of hours. The NVIDIA graphics cards do the job very efficiently and consume a lot less power than a real supercomputer cluster.

Link

Oy... I want.

[Octopuss]

The guys explain the eight NVIDIA GPUs deliver the same performance for their work as more than 300 Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz processors.

huh?

[Zxian]

Exactly. Many people have known for a long time that, if harnessed correctly, the parallel processors on modern GPUs can outperform CPUs on a massive scale. The main problem, up until recently, has been direct access to those GPU subprocessors. We've already seen that future graphics cards are becoming more than just video cards - the GX280 includes the Aegia PhysX processors onboard, making it handle both graphics and physics calculations.