Hasta La Gadget!

This week the folks at NVIDIA are making it clear that the K20 family of Tesla GPU architecture is ready for action, and riding in on the wave of power comes the Titan – K20 accelerated and named world’s fastest supercomputer just this morning. The Titan supercomputer works with a beastly 18,688 NVIDIA Tesla K20X GPU accelerator units and makes it clear that this family is more than ready to knock the cap off the processing roof in more ways than one. In addition to being the fastest GPU in the world the K20X model working with the Titan has been revealed as the new #1 entry on the Green500 list for energy efficiency.

It’s a big day for NVIDIA with the Tesla K20 architecture being reintroduced in its final form powered by CUDA – also known as “the world’s most pervasive parallel programming model.” NVIDIA backs this claim up with 8,000 institutions with CUDA developers, 1,500,000 CUDA downloads, and a massive 395,000,000 GPUs shipped with CUDA built in. With 629 university courses being taught on CUDA across 62 countries, it’s safe to say that it’s here for some time to come.

The K20 family also makes with the undeniably next-level powerful performance on scientific applications – this being exactly why the Titan supercomputer uses the architecture for the massive bulk of its processes. The 2011 Gordon Bell Winner for computational simulation was 3.1 Petaflops (3.08 Petaflops on K Computer) with NVIDIA’s new effort bringing on 10+ Petaflops here in 2012.

Both the Tesla K20 and the Tesla K20X work with a single GK110 Kepler GPU with your favorite features – Dynamic Parallelism and Hyper-Q! These units have more than one teraflop peak double precision performance and deliver 10 times the performance of a single CPU – this claim by NVIDIA being based on the following: “Ws-lsMs performance comparison between single E5-2687W @ 3.10GHz vs single Tesla K20X. Tesla K20X > 650 gigaflops.”

There’s also a Tesla K10 model out there, you should know, with memory size of 8GB per board and just SMX inside instead of the addition of Dynamic Parallelism and Hyper-Q, which the K20 and K20X have. The K10 (again, having been on the market now for some time,) has a peak double precision floating point performance of 0.19 teraflops and is made for servers only – it’s peak single precision floating point performance, on the other hand, is 4.58 teraflops. The K20 rings in 1.17 teraflops and 3.52 teraflops for double and single precision floating point performance respectively. The K20X nabs 1.31 teraflops and 3.95 teraflops.

The K20 has 5GB memory size per board while the K20X has 6GB, and both devices have just the one GK110 GPU while the K10 has two GK104 units inside. The K20 units are made for massive beastly tasks like financial computing, computational chemistry and physics, and satellite imaging. The K10 on the other hand is made for seismic, image, signal processing, and video analytics.

The NVIDIA Tesla K20 family of GPU accelerators is ready for action this week – shipping today and available for order from your favorite computer store. NVIDIA is working with Appro, ASUS, Cray, Eurotech, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Quanta Computer, SGI, Supermicro, T-Platforms, Tyan, and NVIDIA reseller partners as well – you’ll have no shortage of choices on your hands. Grab a K20 as fast as you can!

NVIDIA Tesla K20 family reintroduced as world’s most powerful GPU is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

It can’t be easy, running a modern IT department. Not only are people making ever more graphics-hungry demands on your servers, but NVIDIA and AMD are locked in an unending spec war that can make it hard to keep up with the market. The FirePro S10000 is merely the latest salvo: a dual-GPU, server-focused version of the W9000 that greatly increases overall compute power, delivering 5.91 TFLOPs of single precision calculations and 1.48 TFLOPS of dual precision performance in a single PCIe 3.0 card with 6GB of GDDR5 RAM. Even though the Graphics Core Next GPUs have been slightly underclocked to 825MHz, and even though they technically offer better performance per watt than a single-GPU configuration, their overall 375w power draw could still get you in trouble with your local power station. That level of consumption is around 50 percent higher than a regular server card like the S9000 or Tesla K10 and it may well require you to research new server cases and coolers in addition to weighing up the $3,600 cost for the component itself. See? This was never going to be straightforward.

AMD’s dual-GPU FirePro S10000 gobbles watts, spews out nearly 6 TFLOPs for server graphics originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 12 Nov 2012 05:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Looks like we can kiss goodbye to any lingering politeness in the rivalry between these two UK chip houses, because the smaller one has just embarked on a cheeky expansion. Having been known mainly for its PowerVR graphics processors, not least in many Apple products, Imagination Tech could potentially push into the CPU arena too, through its $60 million acquisition of MIPS Technologies. Just Like ARM, MIPS designs low-power RISC processors for consumer electronics, but it has generally focused on smaller chips for devices like routers and TVs rather than smartphones and tablets. In addition to a portfolio of 82 exclusive patents, a squad of 160 MIPS engineers will now be transplanted to Imagination, where they’ll no doubt be debriefed and reassigned to conquering the world. Meanwhile, in some sort of flanking move, ARM has paid a far higher sum of $170 million to gain access to a number of other MIPS patents.

[Thanks, Michael]

Imagination Technologies snaps up CPU designer MIPS in an attempt to wrestle ARM originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 06 Nov 2012 06:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Today the folks at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, NVIDIA, and Cray have brought on the next generation of accelerated computing with not just a re-naming of the Jaguar supercomputer, but integration with NVIDIA’s solutions for GPU-powered greatness. This update turns the Titan (as it is now called) into the flagship accelerated computing system – the flagship for the whole world, that is. This is now a 200-cabinet Cray XK7 supercomputer working with 18,688 notes – AMD 16-core Opteron plus NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPUs – enough to change the way we work.

This project is a next-level teaming of the Cray XK7, the “most scalable supercomputer” on the planet, and the NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPU, aka the “world’s fastest accelerator.” This combination beings on CUDA and Open ACC programming and new features that expand programmability far beyond what’s been available before, and with the NVIDIA GPU units being used now, they’re working with 3x higher performance per watt. This means one whole heck of a lot less power consumed for the same tasks as were being performed before.

This supercomputer is currently in the acceptance process for a series of scientific applications. The program that surrounds this unit is made to expand the access groups have to supercomputing, judging each application for a program individually and giving them time based on the percentages allotted to each of the following: Plasma, Nuclear, Materials, Engineering, Earth Science, Computer Science, Chemical Science, Biology, and Astrophysics. This is all done through the US Department of Energy’s INCITE: Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment.

This program has seen a record number of proposals, with demand being approximately three times larger than they’re actually able to supply. Have a peek at the gallery below to see a few examples of what these applicants are proposing:

This also brings the Jaguar – again, now called Titan – up to a whole new specifications set. The compute notes remain the same at 18,688, but the Login and I/O nodes go up from 256 all the way to 512. The memory per node was at 16Gb and is now at 32GB + 6GB. Number of Opteron cores jumps from 224,256 to 299,008, and the total system memory was at 300TB and is now at 710TB. With the addition of 18,688 NVIDIA K20 Kepler accelerators, this beast’s former peak performance at 2.3 Petaflops is dwarfed by its current peak at 20+ Petaflops.

TITAN sees unprecedented demand for supercomputing science projects is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Cray’s Jaguar (or XK7) supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been loaded up with the first shipping NVIDIA Telsa K20 GPUs and renamed Titan. Loaded with 18,688 of the Kepler-based K20s, Titan’s peak performance is more than 20 petaflops. Sure, the machine has an equal number of 16-core AMD Opteron 6274 processors as it does GPUs, but the Tesla hardware packs 90 percent of the entire processing punch. Titan is roughly ten times faster and five times more energy efficient than it was before the name change, yet it fits into the same 200 cabinets as its predecessor. Now that it’s complete, the rig will analyze data and create simulations for scientific projects ranging from topics including climate change to nuclear energy. The hardware behind Titan isn’t meant to power your gaming sessions, but the NVIDIA says lessons learned from supercomputer GPU development trickle back down to consumer-grade cards. For the full lowdown on the beefed-up supercomputer, hit the jump for a pair of press releases.

Continue reading Cray’s Jaguar supercomputer upgraded with NVIDIA Tesla GPUs, renamed Titan

Filed under: Science, NVIDIA

Cray’s Jaguar supercomputer upgraded with NVIDIA Tesla GPUs, renamed Titan originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 29 Oct 2012 03:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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