A desktop supercomputer named FASTRA that uses four NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics cards and costs less than 4000EUR has been built.
This was announced by researchers at the University of Antwerp in Belgium.
The GeForce 9800 GX2 cards use NVIDIA CUDA Technology. It enables developers to utilize NVIDIA GPUs to solve the most complex computation-intensive challenges such as oil and gas exploration, financial risk management, product design, medical imaging, and scientific research.
When it comes to performance this supercomputer comes at par with other supercomputers consisting of hundreds of PCs.
Supercomputer FASTRA with 8 Nvidia GPUs (Image courtesy of University of Antwerp)
It is used by ASTRA research group in image reconstruction which involves large-scale scientific computations, that can easily take weeks on a normal PC. They can now perform three-dimensional reconstructions within a few hours: over 100 times as fast.
According to the details ASTRA which is a part of the Vision Lab of the University of Antwerp focuses on the development of 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.
Graphics cards are highly suitable for tomography computations because each graphics processor (GPU) contains 128 small subprocessors that can all work in parallel. By appropriate programming of the GPUs, in this case using NVIDIA
CUDA technology, many calculations can be performed simultaneously.
FASTRA supercomputer delivers the same performance as more than 350 Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz processors, researchers said.
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