Dell now has a 16-GPU PCIe Expansion Chassis for sale, enabling you to install up to 16 GPU’s and hook it all up to a single computer.  The design of the device was pushed by the Oil and Gas industry who have really embraced GPGPU computing as a way to accelerate their massive dataset analysis.

I thought it was really interesting that when an oil and gas customer came to Dell and asked for a chassis solution for GPUs, their “GPU-to-server” ratio requirement went from 2:1 in the beginning all the way up to 4:1 (4 GPUs per server).

Presumably this ratio was determined by testing and maybe tuning their GPGPU application. Or it simply might’ve been because the chassis made it practical to access 4 GPUs.

Oil and Gas have always loved GPU technology, first for the ability to visualize and render their massive datasets interactively, and now for it’s amazing ability to run their massive image analysis kernels at unheard of speed.  The massive quantity of GPU’s is only partially driven by computing power, tho, as I bet it’s mainly driven by memory requirements (drop 8 of the new Quadro 6000’s in there and get access to 48G of Video Memory).

via What Is Your Application’s GPU-to-CPU Ratio? – Blog – Pixel I/O.