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By Brett Winterford
www.itnews.com.au
November 23, 2009
The CSIRO is expected to this week announce the launch of a new supercomputer, which uses a cluster of GPUs (graphical processing units) to gain a processing capacity that competes with supercomputers over twice its size.
The supercomputer [pictured in gallery above right] is one of the world's first to combine traditional CPUs with the more powerful GPUs.
It features 100 Intel Xeon CPU chips and 50 Tesla GPU chips, connected to an 80 Terabyte Hitachi Data Systems network attached storage unit.
The CSIRO said the supercomputer 's NVIDIA-based GPU technology can increase the speed of its scientific data crunching by a factor of between 10 and 100.
The CSIRO claimed the system boasted processing capacity of some 200+ teraflops (i.e. over 200 trillion floating point calculations per second), which would appear on face level to be greater than the 140 teraflop-capable supercomputer announced by the Australian National University last week.
But the CSIRO concedes that these stats can't be taken on a like-for-like basis - the CSIRO supercomputer is 256 Teraflops of "single precision" (32-bit) computing performance, while the ANU machine is 140 Teraflops of "double precision" (64-bit) computing performance.
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