HPC people have been investigating Tesla & other CUDA technologies for several years, but mainly through test & development servers and homebrew configurations. No longer will that be required, as now IBM is jumping in the game by packing the new Tesla M2050 card into their new systems.
“NVIDIA provides an innovative solution for customers who push the envelope in high-performance computing,” said Dave Turek, vice president, Deep Computing, IBM. “GPU acceleration provides performance boosts for many applications in energy exploration, science and financial services. It is among the significant emerging supercomputer technologies to watch in the years ahead.”
The industry standard benchmarking tool LINPACK boasts an 8x improvement when run on a server with 2 M2050’s installed, so the Top500 might see some amazing upsets from smaller IBM clusters this year.
Full release after the break.
NVIDIA Tesla GPUs Power New IBM Servers
SANTA CLARA, Calif. —May 18, 2010—NVIDIA announced today that the latest IBM iDataPlex servers are the first mainstream high performance computing (HPC) systems to be built around NVIDIA® Tesla™ 20-series GPUs.
“NVIDIA provides an innovative solution for customers who push the envelope in high-performance computing,” said Dave Turek, vice president, Deep Computing, IBM. “GPU acceleration provides performance boosts for many applications in energy exploration, science and financial services. It is among the significant emerging supercomputer technologies to watch in the years ahead.”
NVIDIA Tesla M2050 is a GPU Computing module integrated into servers that delivers dramatic performance benefits, while enabling maximum reliability and tight integration with system monitoring and management tools, giving data center IT staff greater choice in how they deploy GPUs. A single 1U server[1], for example, equipped with two Tesla M2050 GPU modules has eight times the LINPACK benchmark performance of a typical 1U[2] server.
“IBM’s adoption of Tesla for their HPC server line is the most significant milestone in Tesla history,” said Andy Keane, general manager, Tesla business at NVIDIA. “Scientists worldwide can now access the power of Tesla and CUDA from the world leader in technical computing.”
GPU Computing is reaching critical mass. More than 350 universities are teaching CUDA, which enables GPUs to be deployed for supercomputing and other visual computing applications. In the past two years, 10 books have been written on the subject by researchers and developers. The CUDA developer toolkit has been downloaded more than 200,000 times, enabling the development of applications across many fields of scientific and high performance computing. These include financial modeling, oil and gas, federal and defense as well as key research codes in bioscience, such as AMBER, GROMACS and NAMD.
For more information on IBM’s iDataPlex dx360 M3 Servers, please go here and for more technical information on NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPU Computing modules, please go here.
About NVIDIANVIDIA awakened the world to the power of computer graphics when it invented the GPU in 1999. Since then, it has consistently set new standards in visual computing with breathtaking, interactive graphics available on devices ranging from tablets and portable media players to notebooks and workstations. NVIDIA’s expertise in programmable GPUs has led to breakthroughs in parallel processing which make supercomputing inexpensive and widely accessible. The company holds more than 1,100 U.S. patents, including ones covering designs and insights which are fundamental to modern computing. For more information, see www.nvidia.com.
Certain statements in this press release including, but not limited to, statements as to: the benefits and impact of the Company’s products and technologies; are forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to be materially different than expectations. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include: our reliance on third parties to manufacture, assemble, package and test our products; global economic conditions; development of faster or more efficient technology; the impact of technological development and competition; design, manufacturing or software defects; changes in consumer preferences or demands; changes in industry standards and interfaces; unexpected loss of performance of our products or technologies when integrated into systems; as well as other factors detailed from time to time in the reports NVIDIA files with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, including its Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2010. Copies of reports filed with the SEC are posted on the Company’s website and are available from NVIDIA without charge. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and speak only as of the date hereof, and, except as required by law, NVIDIA disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.
