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Desktop Supercomupter

Supercomputers prove to be very helpful in scientific experiments. A supercomputer is usually made of clusters upon clusters of smaller interconnected computers that work in parallel. If your current desktop PC has 2, 4 or 8 cores, supercomputers may combine more than 1,000 multi-core CPUs to provide enormous number-crunching power. However, there’s another possibility to constructing a super computer. Instead of using many CPUs, one may use the GPUs found in graphics cards. It is known that GPUs are superior to CPUs when it comes to complex calculations. That’s why Nvidia came up with CUDA, a technology that allows you to use up to 4 graphics cards that would provide roughly the same performance as a supercomputer cluster consisting of hundreds of PCs.

The ASTRA research group, part of the Vision Lab of the University of Antwerp, decided to extensively use the CUDA technology to develop new computational methods for tomography. In order to achieve this, they put together the FASTRA system containing 4 MSI 9800GX2 graphics cards (8 GPUs in total|) which are said to deliver the same performance as more than 300 Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz processors. Of course you don’t see much improvement in games while using quad-SLI configurations, but that’s because the graphic drivers are not quite fully developed and the game engines are not optimized for such configurations. Otherwise, the CUDA does tomographic calculations very efficiently and consumes a lot less power than a supercomputer cluster.

Here is a list with the components used for the $4,000 FASTRA system:

• AMD Phenom 9850 processor + Scythe Infinity CPU cooler
• 4x MSI 9800GX2 graphics card
• 4x 2GB Corsair Twinx DDR2 PC6400 memory
• MSI K9A2 Platinum motherboard
• Samsung Spinpoint F1 750GB HDD
• ThermalTake Toughpower 1500W Modular PSU
• Lian-Li PC-P80 Armorsuit case
• Windows XP 64-bit

The biggest problem of the system is that these four dual-GPU graphics cards are cramped together and generate quite a lot of heat. The FASTRA uses aircooling and with the sidepanel removed the GPUs run at 55°C in idle, 86°C under full load and 100°C under full load with the shaders 20% overclocked. Hey guys, how about using some water cooling system if not liquid nitrogen? Also check this demo clip for more details:

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