Tuesday, October 27th 2009
ASUS et. al. Introduce Tesla and Nehalem Xeon Powered Desktop Supercomputer
ASUS, in collaboration with NVIDIA and the National Chao Tung University of Taiwan, has introduced the ESC 1000 desktop-sized supercomputer, that harnesses the power of GPGPU, to give out 1.1 TFLOPs of computational power. Enclosed in a 445 x 217.5 x 545 mm chassis (the size of tower server/workstation chassis,) is a system powered by an Intel Xeon W3580 "Nehalem" 3.33 GHz processor, aided by 24 GB of system memory. As many as three NVIDIA Tesla c1060 GPGPU cards are installed, with an NVIDIA Quadro FX 5800 handing graphics. These emphasize that the system is meant for highly complex visual computing, such as in the fields of highly complex modeling, and scientific research. The pricing and availability of the ESC 1000 is not known as yet.
Source:
PCAdvisor
17 Comments on ASUS et. al. Introduce Tesla and Nehalem Xeon Powered Desktop Supercomputer
Shame they didnt use a Nehalem-EP platform. It wouldnt have cost any more if just populated with one CPU... but would give an upgrade path.
I agree that dual Xeons are silly for a SINGLE application when running technical code over 3x Teslas, however, with a second CPU, you could run VMware and virtualise the whole thing... allowing the workstation to be used for other stuff while the research runs are completed in the virtual machine. (Dedicate one CPU to virtual machine, the other to regular use).
That computer is going to get hot and therefore noisy. I'm surprised they didnt choose to rackmount it, or at least have an even bigger case with noise insulation and better airflow management. That case looks nice but doesnt look designed for cooling 3x Teslas, a GPU, and a big CPU.
(those cards look packed in really tight)
this is not all that impressive considering silverstone built a rig with 2 295's and 2 9800GX2's folding in their raven II case. But it is the only pre-built on the market that offers these specs so I guess thats a plus.