A few weeks ago Cray CTO Steve Scott made waves in the HPC News media with the announcement of his resignation and move to a “computing partner” that wouldn’t be named. Most people figured they meant AMD. Well, it’s been named now and it’s a shocker: He’s the new CTO of NVidia’s Tesla business unit.
“There are few people on the planet that have Steve’s deep system level understanding of high performance computing,” said Bill Dally, Nvidia’s chief scientist. ”Steve’s decision to join Nvidia is a resounding endorsement that GPU accelerated computing is the future of HPC. He will play a central role in architecting the world’s most powerful supercomputers.”
Two new offerings from NVidia today, first the new Geforce GTX560 card. In a new video on YouTube you can see it running the new Duke Nukem Forever in 1080p Stereo. Looks like a nice little bump from their existing stuff, nothing revolutionary. See the video below.
Perhaps bigger news is the new Tesla M2090 card, boasting some impressive new computing figures for GPU compute in scientific spaces.
It’s said that Tesla M2090 GPUs coupled with four CPUs delivered record performance of 69 nanoseconds of simulation per day.The fastest AMBER performance recorded on a CPU-only supercomputer is 46 ns/day.
To put it a bit simpler, a simulation of 1 microsecond of time that took 22 days previously, now takes 14, a nice saving of a week.
Over at the NVidia Forums, they’ve published some impressive benchmarking results of the new-ish Telsa C2050 Fermi-driven board running various CUDA, CULA, and HPC simulation codes. They compare the results to the previous generation Tesla cards, as well as the newest Intel CPU’s. The results are impressive. Just check out these graphs:
Be sure to check out the full PDF on their website (forum registration required, unless of course someone hosts it else where and posts the link in the comments…)
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.
I never have seen much use for the Quadro or Tesla series of graphics processing units from Nvidia. Most of the time you can use the cheaper GeForce series to accomplish the same task at a fraction of the cost. With the new Tesla series, you get full double precision support and ECC. I can now see a reason to buy them over the GeForce series.
Here’s another behind the scenes look at NVIDIA. General manager Andy Keane explains how Tesla-based servers will help engineers and scientists solve complex problems, with teraflop-class computing at their fingertips. With the first wave of Tesla-based servers launching earlier this week – and more news from OEMs expected in the weeks ahead – this is an exciting time for the Tesla team.
The Tesla is a high-end product from Nvidia that is meant to serve the General Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU). Nvidia’s partners have started announcing products based on the latest version of the Tesla. For example, Supermicro has found a way to fit the Tesla M2050 – which is really just a professional version of the GeForce GTX 470 – into a 1U 19-inch rackmount chassis.
Today we saw the first of a series of launches from our partners of new products based on our new Tesla M2050 GPU Computing modules. What’s particularly exciting about these launches is that they are all server products, an important area of the Tesla business and one that’s about to take off exponentially. For the last 3 years we have seen a lot of pilot projects — in banks, in the military, in science — projects that enabled scientists and researchers to experiment with GPUs and see how they can be used to increase the pace and scope of their work.
At the SuperComputing conference back in November of 2009, one could find the still-yet-to-be-released Fermi graphics card running in the NVidia booth. At the recent CEBIT conference, SemiAccurate has spotted a system with four Fermi-based Tesla cards, and even has the picture to prove it. To see a picture of it, you will have to click on through the link below. There is just one small catch however:
Should you want to move to greener pastures, SuperMicro has the servers for you. There were 2 and 4 Tesla/Quadro servers featuring that loveable scamp, Fermi. These were genuine 'puppies', meaning they were not functional, just mockups. There are not enough samples to go around to bring working cards, much less six of them, to a trade show. (As a note to Nvidia PR, SuperMicro was honest when asked about the status of the cards on display. It can be done, no one died!)
NVidia and Mental Images just announced their newest product offering at the Web2.0 Summit in San Francisco, CA: RealityServer3 and TeslaRS.
RealityServer is a product of Mental Images, which NVidia acquired back in 2007. Mental Images is well known for their popular Mental Ray renderer, and RealityServer has been around for a while, with version 2.3 coming out back in July. What makes RealityServer3 new and exciting is the integration with their recently announced iray real-time raytracing system, and pushes the whole thing across the web to create a web-based interactive ray-tracing solution. Build yourself a nice cluster with NVidia hardware and RealityServer software, and you can push high-resolution high-quality graphics anywhere in the world with internet access and web browsers. iPhones, desktops, laptops, even gaming consoles suddenly have access to the type of rendered visuals previously reserved for Hollywood studios.
But what kind of hardware would you deploy this on? NVidia hopes it will be the TeslaRS.
Read up on the details of RealityServer & the TeslaRS after the break.
Surprised they didn’t get this out in time for SIGGRAPH, but Supermicro has raised the bar by announcing a new workstation that can hold four of NVidia’s Tesla C1060′s in a single towercase.
The new 704GT-TRF SuperWorkstations are based on Intel Xeon 5500 [Nehalem] core processors and support up to four NVIDIA Tesla C1060 GPUs. They also support up to three additional PCI-e add-on cards for additional expansion. In order to keep such a beast fueled, they feature redundant Gold Level [93%+ efficiency] 1400-watt power supplies.
HP has just announced a new workstation, the Z800, that is now available with Dual NVidia Tesla units, making it one of the most powerful workstations I know of. From the press release:
In molecular dynamics, AMBER, a public research code with more than 60,000 users, has been written to leverage the massively parallel CUDA architecture to deliver a 50X speed up of simulations. The result is faster scientific insights for researchers. In finance, Numerix and CompatibL have announced CUDA support for a new Counterparty Risk application of their Numerix 7 analytics solution used by over 375 financial institutions. This derivatives pricing application is today experiencing an 18X boost in performance in the calculation of complex pricing models with NVIDIA GPUs.
The Z800 is available for as low at $1800, although that’s without the Tesla’s. I was unable to find a configuration with dual-Tesla’s using the provided configuration tool. If anyone gets a price on one of these, let us know!
A few weeks ago Cray CTO Steve Scott made waves in the HPC News media with the announcement of his resignation and move to a “computing partner” that wouldn’t be named. Most people figured they meant AMD. Well, it’s been named now and it’s a shocker: He’s the new CTO of NVidia’s Tesla business unit.
Two new offerings from NVidia today, first the new 
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.
Surprised they didn’t get this out in time for SIGGRAPH, but Supermicro has raised the bar by announcing a new workstation that can hold four of NVidia’s Tesla C1060′s in a single towercase.
HP has just announced a new workstation, the Z800, that is now available with Dual NVidia Tesla units, making it one of the most powerful workstations I know of. From the press release:
VizWorld.com 
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