Virginia Tech's HokieSpeed supercomputer to rely on CPU and GPU synergies
By Darren Murph 
posted August 7th 2010 8:10AM
posted August 7th 2010 8:10AM
Virginia Tech's no stranger to housing supercomputers -- those folks strung together 324 Mac Pros back in 2008 just for kicks, giggles and "research" -- but their latest computing monolith is quite the shift from the ordinary. A cool $2 million is floating over to Blacksburg in order to create HokieSpeed, a "versatile new supercomputing instrument" that'll soon be primed and ready to handle not just one or two tasks, but a variety of disciplines. Wu Feng, associate professor of computer science at the university, calls this magnificent monster a "new heterogeneous supercomputing instrument based on a combination of central processing units (CPUs) and graphical processing units (GPUs)," with expected performance to be orders of magnitude higher than their previous claim to fame, System X. One of its first assignments? To give end users the ability "to perform in-situ visualization for rapid visual information synthesis and analysis," and during the late hours, hosts a campus-wide Quake deathmatch. Just kidding on that last bit... maybe.
Lets hope those systems don't have a Death Grip...
But will it run Crysis?
@WhoIsCalvin
You my friend fail on multiple levels.
@WhoIsCalvin
Do you think it will blend?
@WhoIsCalvin I hope you get down voted for being one of the people who are forcing memes on almost every article that isn't in any way shape or form at all related at all.
Comment Responsibly.
@WhoIsCalvin
TOTALLY worth a Quake deathmatch!
@TheCake
Crysis LAN party! Wewt!
go tech go!
Pluh!
Are they using student tuition or our tax dollars for this crap?
@iPhone 4
You sound uneducated. You also sound fat.
@iPhone 4 yes, because a public university using funds to make a supercomputer is a total waste of time. There is nothing students and PhDs could learn from building it or using it to run mathematical models of things.
@redkamel I stand corrected. The way the article is written it sounds like we are building a $2M super computer for its own sake.
Go HOKIES! :-)
@patrick4vt they may have Hokie speed but just wait until September 6 when they see Bronco speed.
I find this difficult to masturbate to.
It is so funny. I studied at Vtech and Wu Feng was my professor...
These look like cheap generic 1u boxes that have GPUs in them. Or is there some other special thing about them that I might be missing? Special interconnect? FPGA card?
2 million dollars on this new super computer? Wow, that's A LOT cheaper than 324 Mac Pros. By at least a million, if not more.
:)
@Prevacator
Not necessarily. I've bought for education before, and the discounts on hardware are somewhat decent. (And the discount on software is amazing)
The one pictured is nothing special. It is not the cluster being discussed however, just a temporary testbed for in-group use. HokieSpeed will be a different animal.
they may have hokie speed but wait until
September 6th when they see BRONCO SPEED
Tech student here. Don't be knockin' our Quake LAN parties!
If the pic is accurate, they look like supermicro servers.
Look its the next android phone haha. But seriously it'll be interesting to see how it holds up.
GPUs are dominating in parallel processing. A good analogy is a math professor versus a room of math students. China hit the Top 10 last year with a Radeon based supercomputer at #5 then moved up to #2 with a GeForce based one this year
That last bit wouldn't be to bad at all.
That picture.. It did something to my eyes..
I was at a demo where the new head of DARPA came through and looked at our research projects at Tech last summer, these guys had an early prototype of this running some sort of real time particle physics rendering magic program and based on the numbers they were talking about using just 1 GPU, I was freaking impressed, I can't imagine how awesome this is going to be.
I have to transfer to Virginia Tech now, just for the Quake deathmatch