ORNL is making a play to take back the #1 spot on the Top 500 with another upgrade to their Jaguar frankenputer, I mean supercomputer. Already part Cray XT4 and part XT5, the new “wing” will be XK6 systems running with NVidia GPU’s. The initial parts will be Tesla M2090’s, but then later parts will be based on the new Kepler design. The final system is designed to hold 18,000 GPU’s.
“Oak Ridge’s decision to base Titan on Tesla GPUs underscores the growing belief that GPU-based heterogeneous computing is the best approach to reach exascale computing levels within the next decade,” said Steve Scott, chief technology officer of Tesla products at NVIDIA, referring to computing performance levels of 1,000 petaflops. “The Tesla GPUs will provide over 85 percent of the peak performance of Titan. You simply can’t get this level of performance in a power- and cost-efficient way with CPUs alone.”
I’ve personally come to believe that adding GPU’s to HPC’s is a short-term solution to a bigger problem. Until we can come up with some operating systems and better tools for programming these behemoths, the major hindrance will be the development cycle.
