In May, the University of Antwerp unveiled its €4,000 supercomputer, which can easily compete with conventional supercomputers costing several million euros each. This feat was made possible by the use of CUDA and four GeForce 9800 GX2s.To further their research into bone structure, the university has developed the next evolutionary step of their supercomputer: the Fastra 2. It is based on an Asus P6T7 WS motherboard with 7 PCIe slots, and no less than six GeForce GTX295 and GTX275s. for a theoretical computing power of up to 12 TFLOPS. The cost of this machine is estimated to be €6,000.
The mounting structure has necessitated the use of several PCIe extension cords; manufacturing a box specifically designed to contain the GPUs; the development of a special BIOS (with the help of Asus); and patches for the Linux kernel.
The rest of the setup consists of a Core i7 920, 12GB of RAM spread across 6 2GB chips, a 1TB Samsung hard drive, a Thermaltake Thoughpower 1500W PSU, and three PowerExpress 450W PSUs. You can see a whole video posted by the researchers on Youtube.
This computing power is used for rendering high-resolution tomographic bone structures, and is done in the context of research into bone diseases such as osteoporosis.
Source: fastra2.ua.ac.be
KaySL
On: 12/17/09
