NVIDIA announces cost, energy-saving Tesla Personal Supercomputer

AMD has already outlined its plans to harness the power of its GPUs for some added computing muscle, and it looks like NVIDIA is now taking things one step further by announcing its new GPU-based Tesla Personal Supercomputer, which promises to deliver the power of a traditional supercomputer cluster at 1/100th of the price. That "personal supercomputer" is actually a platform based on NVIDIA's new Tesla C1060 GPU Computing Processor, which itself is based on NVIDIA's CUDA parallel computing architecture. The supercomputers themselves will come from a whole host of manufacturers that have already partnered with NVIDIA, including ASUS, Dell, Lenovo, and a number of more specialized computer makers. While complete details on those systems are still a bit light at the moment, they'll apparently be "priced like a conventional PC workstation," and the first few out of the gate should be available starting today.

[rock99rock @ Nov 18th 2008 12:32PM]

At that cost, we should all get one and donate the downtime to folding@home .

[Jeff @ Nov 18th 2008 12:36PM]

Agreed.

[Ghen @ Nov 18th 2008 2:19PM]

Great minds think alike. This could be another revolutionary step for Folding like the PS3 client before it if the real thing lives up to the marketing.

[haX0r @ Nov 18th 2008 3:01PM]

Also like to donate some power to SETI@home http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/

[loujob @ Nov 18th 2008 9:17PM]

Their gpu only does 1TFLOP, with the 4870 doing 1.4 TFLOPS. If you are just doing folding@home you might as well just get some 48xx ranging from 1/11the the price of the latest tesla for 1 TFLOP to 1/5th for 2.4 TFLOPS (more than 2x the performance using the 4870x2).

[iEye @ Nov 18th 2008 12:35PM]

how long does it take to get to 0-60 TeraFLOPS?

[iansilv @ Nov 18th 2008 1:45PM]

3.6 seconds

Oh wait...

[Patriks7 @ Nov 18th 2008 12:36PM]

And I always thought that cost/energy-saving and Supercomputer don't really go together..

[Dustin Hess @ Nov 18th 2008 2:18PM]

me either

[Ian @ Nov 18th 2008 12:38PM]

Tesla... now that's a name that evokes a reputation of energy saving.

[Kamokazi @ Nov 18th 2008 12:42PM]

Considering he invented AC which was far more efficient than the DC it replaced in power lines, I would say, yes, he should.

[bangladeshiluv @ Nov 18th 2008 1:02PM]

RIP tesla

[ajfarson @ Nov 18th 2008 1:24PM]

Did he "invent" AC or "discover" it?

[Lowest Ranked @ Nov 18th 2008 1:36PM]

...and the confusion ensues...

[OneLove @ Nov 18th 2008 2:22PM]

He discovered air conditioning?

[Andir3.0 @ Nov 18th 2008 3:22PM]

... efficient over long runs, but not as efficient at actually doing things at the other end which is why everything transforms it to DC.

[MS @ Nov 18th 2008 3:56PM]

Tesla pioneered AC for power transmission, he didn't just "discover" it. The electricity found in nature, like lightning strikes and electric eels, is DC. The kind of regular, sine wave AC juice you get out of the wall has to be man-made. Tesla didn't invent the first instance of AC electricity, because he didn't make the first hand-cranked generator, but he refined it for use as a safe power source. It's also vastly more efficient to transfer AC over long distances.

[Johan S @ Nov 18th 2008 4:42PM]

I think you can say he "independently invented" it. Although you can have natural generators of what can be described as AC current, he had to build a generator to create an AC current of the specifications he wanted.. therefore he "invented" it --sort of.

For example, natural bridges have existed (tree falling across a river).. but are we going to say that the Brooklyn Bridge was discovered and not invented?

[Andir3.0 @ Nov 18th 2008 7:55PM]

Technically, the bridge was designed and built... not invented. It was a modification of current designs, plans and experiences of other bridges. It would be like saying that Chevy invented the electric car because they built one that looks different than the rest.

[Dan Fruzzetti @ Nov 18th 2008 12:40PM]

I never knew the market for a super-cheap number crunching machine was so likely to be lucrative. I mean, are these machines good for all-around work or are they primarily marketed at those who will write custom software to model particular computationally intensive problems (for example optimization of the shape of a low-gain antenna for a satellite, etc)?

[Joseph @ Nov 18th 2008 12:51PM]

I would think any college worth their salt would want some of these, as opposed to their current space/energy consuming clusters.

[jepzilla @ Nov 18th 2008 1:41PM]

These require custom software to take advantage of the hardware. But, for example, a lot of electronic design today is already being done on similar hardware. Your cell phone was probably designed on an NVIDIA gpu.

[Felixxx @ Nov 18th 2008 5:18PM]

For running vast RPG worlds servers? Or, perhaps, a multi-user Transport Tycoon server? Where do I queue for a bunch of those?

[buu700 @ Nov 18th 2008 7:50PM]

So, if it requires custom software, is there any chance of a Linux port (for normal desktop usage)? Or can GPUs not be utilized for the same kinds of things as CPUs?

[Matthew Hilario @ Nov 18th 2008 12:40PM]

And to think I was gonna get the Thomas Edison-based Super Computer.

[decapitor @ Nov 18th 2008 12:41PM]

Great because everyone wants to recode all their files to work with CUDA. Make it able to run all my c based code including mpi calls as is and I'd buy several in a heartbeat. ( via grant $)

[Macdelaney @ Nov 18th 2008 12:45PM]

That should be mentioned in the article

[Joseph @ Nov 18th 2008 12:47PM]

If you could save millions of man hours, i think you would spend the hundreds of hours to recode.

Think of the energy savings alone.

[decapitor @ Nov 18th 2008 12:50PM]

@Joseph:

Sure and I'd consider it but I only want to go through that process once and I'd like to see who wins out CUDA or OpenCL before I take that plunge. (Plus not to sound like a dick but I can run my stuff on a Blue Gene right now so I'm in no particular rush)

[Atanas Boev @ Nov 18th 2008 1:13PM]

@Joseph: yes, think of the millions of people who will have to calculate on paper for one hour :)

[Rory @ Nov 19th 2008 12:41AM]

@ Joseph

You have the right idea, but in practice - even if you have the time to recode, which is a big if considering customer (sponsors for the universities) demands - recoding the types of things that run on current clusters is difficult, because they have been built up over years by numerous people who have scattered all over the place from where the project started. At work we have a Tesla "Deskside Supercomputer" breakout box that cost something like $5k that the IT guys claim is as powerful as one of our $100k+ AMD64-based 80+ core clusters. We write a lot of code in-house as well as modify third-party codes, so we thought we could tackle it pretty easily, but after setting the thing up it has done nothing but collect dust for 6 months. Until somebody comes up with compilers that that can take existing code and make good enough guesses at where to direct the CUDA calls that actually gain some performance, then it isn't economical to code for them. There are some stop-gaps out there - I'm personally looking at some situations for some of my code where a company has written an environment plugin that have unique variable type definitions for execution in parallel on the GPUs where a find & replace job might get me some significant gains - but I'm still too busy with things that work on the cluster that is already there to sit down and do it. Where these have the most utility is for new projects, which, for now anyway, makes it a niche market.

[thedesolate1 @ Nov 19th 2008 10:50AM]

Im not expert at this but would this mean that all virus have to be rewritten to be able to run on this architecture? If so then sign me up! You are essentially killing 2 sticks with one stone. Am I right?

[zyren @ Nov 19th 2008 7:10PM]

im pretty sure you dont have to recode stuff for CUDA. There was a lot of miscommunication with the writers of articles who claimed that CUDA required a modified version of C to run on their GPUs. However, Nvidia debunked that a long time ago saying CUDa is just a different c compiler and pretty much all c code written previously should work for it.

[Steve_S @ Nov 18th 2008 12:43PM]

Sooo I can play games at a billion FPS with this?

[Samboini @ Nov 18th 2008 2:49PM]

Are you an idiot or something? The human eye can't detect above 999 million FPS.

[Steve_S @ Nov 18th 2008 3:26PM]

Its a joke man sheesh. No wonder I don't post much on Engadget.

[liv @ Nov 18th 2008 4:02PM]

The reason you don't post on Engadget so much is that you lack the scientific knowledge to make a witty comment...

[Funke, Tobias Dr. @ Nov 18th 2008 9:10PM]

That's a little harsh.

[anantha92 @ Nov 19th 2008 3:28AM]

Grow up guys, he was just joking.

[lifecurbed @ May 6th 2009 11:40PM]

no, that's over 9000.

Nothing goes over 9000.

[Homer @ Nov 18th 2008 12:45PM]

Now that is Crysis- licious!

[Samboini @ Nov 18th 2008 2:47PM]

That doesn't even work.

[Joseph @ Nov 18th 2008 8:09PM]

did you watch this season of project runway?

[Joseph @ Nov 18th 2008 12:45PM]

I think I will bring sexy back w/:
What about a Beowulf cluster of these?

[decapitor @ Nov 18th 2008 12:53PM]

I was thinking of that right when CUDA first came out. Would be pretty epic I imagine.

[jepzilla @ Nov 18th 2008 1:41PM]

They exist. And yes, they are shockingly fast. :-)

Also very hard to code for.

[Choco_Taco @ Nov 19th 2008 10:36PM]

Will this be able to run Crysis 2?

[Phoenix @ Nov 18th 2008 12:53PM]

Serious question, don't flame me, I really want to know...

Is this just a really powerful computer, capable of running intensive games and applications, or does everything need to be specially written for it?

[Macdelaney @ Nov 18th 2008 12:55PM]

Everything needs to be recoded in order to work with CUDA. I know, it sucks, I want a supercomputer too :(

[Phoenix @ Nov 18th 2008 12:59PM]

Ah damn. I thought for a minute there it was gonna give everything a massive performance boost for the same cost.

Oh well, bit far fetched lol