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
Its actually a pretty crappy setup, except ofcourse the 4gfx cards. I applaud CUDA being used to make the cards render images given to them for medical purposes, thats gold and very smart, but other then that, its crappy. Actually, its a total piece of shit.
Sorry, i get emotional :P The only reason i call it a piece of shit computer is because someone actually thinks its SUPER . . . Like i said, nothing super about the actual pc. The super part is the people that wrote the program to make the pc render images for the medical purposes.
Dont IBM have a Supercomputer ? Doesnt everyone have a Supercomputer ?
However, I thank you for clearing that up, as it did present a form of interest to me.
Video cards work fine in the same system dual display without SLI/crossfire, and always have since the PCI days.
What a shame...... they have used AMD Phenom 9850 processor :laugh:.
Insted of AMD Phenom 9850 processor if they have used Intel Core2Extreme they will surely get more peroformance from this system....
since amd phenom uses HT, HT gives allot more bandwith then FSB can ever offer