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
Thats pretty cheap for a supercomputer.
And its being used for medical research ( a damed good thing ) not some useless crap well never see or hear of again.
Gam
Yes. With CUDA... 9800GX2 become the equivelent of stacks of CPUs. The thing that is awesome about this is the fact that 4000 euro is MUCH cheaper than a supercomputer equivalent -COUGH COUGH NASA'S SUPERCOMPUTER COUGH-
In theory it could even run on a ATI+NV card.
I wonder how well this machine would run if it was running on either dual Opterons or dual Xeons. But if it's able to do what would usually take hours in seconds, I'm sure they don't need any more power that it has now.
Actually, just goes to show the raw, unused power some people have in their machines. Of course, I don't think anyone on these forums has four GX2s in one machine, but the 2900s and 3800s do well at F@H already.
Could use multi-socket boards, PCIe expansion systems, etc, but the cost would start to climb considerably compared to a cluster of these boxes.
I'm sure it's a more expensive solution, and probably not as versatile as four GX2s.
Yeah, jsut checked, definitely cheaper to buy four GX2s and a system to put them in.
One Quadro Plex Model IV costs $10750 :O and it's in backorder.
States it can be used for more than jsut rendering, but for the price, and the potential waiting time, I'd just build a system with four GX2s.
Oh, and it only has two GPUs.
Very interesting though.
good c/m as well.
im betting that the cards in the middle get nice and warm though.
anyway this things is very B/A