16 May 2012
Nvidia chip to power world’s top supercomputers
Nvidia has unveiled a new family of Tesla gpus built to handle the most complex high performance computing problems.
The Tesla K10 and K20 are based on the company's 'revolutionary' Kepler architecture, which is said to be three times as efficient as its predecessor, Fermi.
"Fermi was a major step forward in computing," said Bill Dally, chief scientist and senior vice president of research at Nvidia. "It established gpu accelerated computing in the top tier of high performance computing and attracted hundreds of thousands of developers to the gpu computing platform. Kepler will be equally disruptive, establishing gpus broadly into technical computing, due to their ease of use, broad applicability and efficiency."
Nvidia claims the K20 will be the world's highest performance and most energy efficient gpu. It is expected to be incorporated into the new Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Laboratory in Tennessee as well as the Blue Waters system at the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications.
The K10 is said to deliver the world's highest throughput for signal, image and seismic processing applications and is optimised for the oil, gas and defence industries. A single Tesla K10 accelerator board features two GK104 Kepler gpus that deliver an aggregate performance of 4.58teraflops of peak single precision floating point and 320Gb/s memory bandwidth.
"We designed Kepler with an eye towards three things: performance, efficiency and accessibility," said Jonah Alben, senior vice president of gpu engineering and principal architect of Kepler at Nvidia. "It represents an important milestone in gpu accelerated computing and should foster the next wave of breakthroughs in computational research."
Author
Simon Fogg
Supporting Information
Websites
http://www.nvidia.com
Companies
Nvidia Technology UK Ltd
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