16xGPU System
We know Roadrunner is the fastest supercomputer on Earth (for the moment at least), but how much does it cost to assemble and maintain such a behemoth? Millions of dollars? Not that much for a government-funded project. I guess the guys who assembled the Roadrunner didn’t take into consideration what NVIDIA CUDA can provide for their endeavors. CUDA forces all unified stream processors found in a GPU to work as separate CPUs. So if we have two NVIDIA 9800GX2 cards, that would amount to 2X256 processors running at around 1,4 GHZ. This setup alone can turn you computer into a miniature supercomputer that can solve complex equations and coordinate impressive simulations. How about 8 of these cards working in parallel?
MIT graduate students Nicolas Pint, David Cox and James DiCarlo have managed to assemble an impressive 16-GPU system composed of eight 9800GX2 video cards donated by NVIDIA. That would translate into 2048 processors that would deliver more than 20 TFLOPS. The CUDA architecture will soon be adopted by ATI, as well, and that means we will get to use 1600 processors on a single Radeon 4870X2 card. Sure, the ATI unified processors are clocked at a lower frequency than those found on NVIDIA’s cards. Still, eight 4870X2 will net you the power of 6400 processors clocked at around 800 MHz.
Ubergizmo informs that the high-throughput method the three students promote can also use other ubiquitous technologies like IBM's Cell Broadband Engine processor (found in Sony's Playstation 3) or Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing services. What puzzles me is the fact that the team is also involved in the PetaVision project on the Roadrunner, so why didn’t they use the CUDA architecture? That would have cut the costs drastically. I reckon the Roadrunner had been designed before the CUDA architecture actually got released.
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supercomputers make me happy