Been itching to get your hands on a personal supercomputer, as NVIDIA's ad wizards put it? The company has just announced that its CUDA-based Tesla C1060 GPU is now available in Dell's Precision R5400, T5500 and T7500 workstations. And just to put things into perspective, NVIDIA points out that a Dell workstation rockin' a single Tesla C1060 has enough going on under the hood to power the control system for the European Extremely Large Telescope project ("the world's largest," apparently). According to one of the developers, Jeff Meisel at National Instruments, a workstation "equipped with a single Tesla C1060 can achieve near real-time control of the mirror simulation and controller, which before wouldn't be possible in a single machine without the computational density offered by GPUs." Wild, huh? If you're curious about the workout that Tesla GPUs are getting on a wide range of projects, from Bio-Informatics to Computational Chemistry to Molecular Dynamics and more -- or if you're merely a glutton for long-winded PR -- check out the good stuff after the break.

It wasn't all that long ago when a mere nine SSD drives in a RAID array was enough to cause most folks' jaws to drop, but the world of ridiculous technology exercises moves quickly, and we can only be thankful that a select few continually feel the need to one-up each other and share their results with all of us. This latest effort comes from a group enlisted by Samsung (in a not too thinly disguised marketing exercise), who paired up 24 SSDs in a RAID array totaling 6TB in size. Even more impressive than that, however, is the 2GB per second throughput speed they managed to achieve, which they naturally spared no expense in demonstrating -- as you can see in the video after the break.

[Via Reddit]

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.

Seattle-based Cray has been wowing us with massive, ridiculously fast supercomputers since the '70s, establishing a position for its machines high on every geek's most wanted list -- despite never publishing a Doom benchmark. In recent years the title of "world's fastest" supercomputer had been lost by the company, ping-ponging from Wako, Japan to Armonk, NY, but is now back in Cray's hands with the implementation of the XT Jaguar. It's comprised of over 45,000 quad-core Opteron processors, 362GBTB of memory, and has a 10PB (petabyte) storage array, able to perform calculations at a massive 1.64 petaflops. That's over one and a half quadrillion operations per second and more than 50 percent faster than IBM's previous heavyweight. Mind you, Cray is quick to point out that this is the fastest machine being used for non-classified research, a caveat that just makes us even more curious about what's keeping the Pentagon's server rooms warm and loud... and apparently orange.

Update: That should be 362 terabytes of memory, not mere gigabytes.

[Via UPI.com]