TACC is bringing a new Supercomputing online called “Stampede” which aims to push the limits of Linux Cluster designs and further the NSF’s “Extreme Digital” program. Providing a peak 2 Petaflops of performance, with another 8 petaflops of possible performance thanks to Intel’s Knights Ferry chips, you may be wondering what they plan to use for visualization and analysis.
In addition, Stampede will offer 128 next-generation Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) for remote visualization, 16 Dell servers with 1 terabyte of shared memory and 2 GPUs each for large data analysis, and a high-performance Lustre file system for data-intensive computing.
Many people in the field (myself included) believe that the days of dedicated graphics processing systems are numbered, but Stampede seems to indicate they have some life left in them. However, I have to wonder what percentage of the $50M cost of the system is locked up in these 16 1-terabyte nodes.
