Wednesday, December 30, 2009

FASTRA II - 12TFLOPS Desktop Supercomputer


Scientists from the research group ASTRA, based in Belgium, recently presented their new desktop supercomputer, which is believed to be the world's fastest PC, being powered by six NVIDIA GTX295 dual-GPU cards along with one GTX275 single-GPU card. The desktop supercomputer was installed at the University of Antwerp. It was built to considerably accelerate the interpretation of sophisticated, 3D medical images. The computer was developed in cooperation with Tones.be and ASUS. With 13 GPUs, FASTRA II can reach a total power of 12TFLOPS.
To be able to fit all the necessary hardware in one case, the researchers ordered a special cage where all graphic cards would be stored, being connected to the motherboard with the help of flexible riser cables. The whole system includes 4 power supplies that are meant to satisfy the 13 GPUs. It used at full speed, FASTRA II will be able to outrun even a moderately sized supercomputer.
With 8 graphics processors functioning in parallel, the current system is able to reach the performance of 350 modern CPU cores. It would be used to carry out tomography tasks.
It would be interesting to note that this desktop supercomputer costs less than 4000 Euros.

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