Over at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), they’ve got a new machine online named ‘Longhorn’ that boasts all of the usual numbers in HPC: 210TB local file system, 13.5TB of Memory, and 2048 compute cores. (256 nodes). What makes it a bit different is that it also has 2 GPU’s on each node, offering up 512GPUs of visualization and GPU-computing power, making it 597 Teraflops.
“Longhorn is an impressive machine,” Fogal said. “Using 256 GPUs, we volume rendered data larger than two terabytes, which is among the largest-ever published volume renderings. Such renderings would normally require hundreds of thousands of CPU cores otherwise. Our success was in major part due to the large number of GPUs available, in addition to TACC’s helpful staff that aided us in accessing them for our visualization work.”
But that’s not all. In addition to having the horsepower, it’s got the sexy UI to bring it to the masses. Available to users is the ‘Longhorn Visualization Portal‘, a web-based VNC client that connects with their queueing system to provide direct visual access to a complete desktop, enabling you to run any application you want: CUDA or Visual.
