Saturday, May 31st 2008
University of Antwerp Makes 4k € Supercomputer with Four GeForce 9800 GX2 Cards
Have you ever thought that gaming parts like NVIDIA's GeForce 9800 GTX video cards for instance, can be used for building a supercomputer. Maybe no, but researchers at the University of Antwerp in Belgium have proven that it's possible to build one. Using four NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics cards, AMD Phenom 9850 processor, 4x2GB Corsair Twinx DDR2 PC6400 memory and MSI K9A2 Platinum motherboard, FASTRA costs less than 4000EUR to build and thanks to NVIDIA's CUDA technology and delivers roughly the same performance as a supercomputer cluster consisting of hundreds of PCs. This new system is used by the ASTRA research group, part of the Vision Lab of the University of Antwerp, to develop new computational methods for tomography. Tomography is a technique used in medical scanners to create three-dimensional images of the internal organs of patients, based on a large number of X-ray photos that are acquired over a range of angles. ASTRA develops new reconstruction techniques that lead to better reconstruction quality than classical methods. You can read more about the FASTRA GPU SuperPC project over here.
Source:
DVHardware


83 Comments on University of Antwerp Makes 4k € Supercomputer with Four GeForce 9800 GX2 Cards
A review of math accelerators would be interesting, esp. performance comparison (raw FPU) for
1./ Physx
2./ CUDA
3./ Clearstream
4./ SpursEngine
5./ ...
and the PSU Calculator only goes up with two in sli... so who knows?!?!
but hey...if you got to have it... why not.
i forget we are talking about 8gpus and 4cpus.
this is good advertising for MSI :rockout:
stock shader clock 1500mhz X 128 SP X (MADD (2 FLOPs) + MUL (1 FLOP) X 2 (because theres 2 Gpu's) = 768
GeForce 9800 GX2---------------768---G/Flops---[1152 (peak theoretical)]
GeForce 9800 GX2 SLI (x4)------1536--G/Flops---[2304 (peak theoretical)]
GeForce 9800 GX2 SLI (x8)------3072--G/Flops---[4608 (peak theoretical)]
An over clock of the shader units to somewhere in the order of ~1750mhz, which i would argue is modest on a G92, would bring you these figures.
GeForce 9800 GX2------------896---G/Flops---[1344 (peak theoretical)]
GeForce 9800 GX2 SLI (x4)----1792--G/Flops---[2688 (peak theoretical)]
GeForce 9800 GX2 SLI (x8)----3584--G/Flops---[5376 (peak theoretical)]
so we can see that a modest overclock here brings you a half a teraflop jsut like that, not bad. and a shader overclock of 2000mhz would give you this nice figure on this sytem.
GeForce 9800 GX2 SLI (x8)----4096--G/Flops---[6144 (peak theoretical)
also interestingly ive made some figures based on the current GTX280 estimates.
1296mhz x 240 SP X (MADD (2 FLOPs) + MUL (1 FLOP) X 4 (because we would have four in this system) = 2488 G/flops [3732 (peak theoretical)]
now overclocking....
~1500 mhz x 240 SP X (MADD (2 FLOPs) + MUL (1 FLOP) X 4 (because we would have four in this system) = 2488 G/flops [4320 (peak theoretical)]
~1750 mhz x 240 SP X (MADD (2 FLOPs) + MUL (1 FLOP) X 4 (because we would have four in this system) = 3360 G/flops [5040 (peak theoretical)]
~2000 mhz x 240 SP X (MADD (2 FLOPs) + MUL (1 FLOP) X 4 (because we would have four in this system) = 3840 G/flops [5760 (peak theoretical)]
just imagine four GX2-280's... a man can dream......
:D
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Intel is just wishing!
and shecked there specs when nehalem server parts are comming out it will easly crush that system