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News Article: Microsoft & Cray Release $25,000 Supercomputer

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Edvard:
Ooh, what if Cray made a video card... :tellme:

f0dder:
It would be more like a graphics tower box requiring an insane cooling system than a graphics card, methinks :)

40hz:
Ooh, what if Cray made a video card... :tellme:
-Edvard (September 19, 2008, 12:02 PM)
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It would be more like a graphics tower box requiring an insane cooling system than a graphics card, methinks :)
-f0dder (September 19, 2008, 12:08 PM)
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It would be too late. The University of Antwerp has already used the GPUs in four MSI N9800GX2-M2D1G GeForce 9800 GX2 cards to create a supercomputer.

Your next Cray could cost 4000 euros, and look something like this: http://fastra.ua.ac.be/en/index.html

Belgian researchers develop desktop supercomputer.



How much computing power can you cram into a single desktop PC?

In our research on image reconstruction we often have to perform large-scale scientific computations, which can easily take weeks on a normal PC. To tackle this problem, we have developed a special PC that is capable of performing our computations just as fast as a cluster consisting of hundreds of PCs. Using this superPC, which consists mainly of gaming hardware and costs less than 4000 euro, we can now perform our three-dimensional reconstructions within a few hours: over 100 times as fast.

The research group ASTRA, 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.

Although our reconstruction techniques are very powerful, they have an important drawback: they are quite slow. As the 3D images that we normally deal with can be rather large (typically 1024x1024x1024 volume elements, or more), advanced reconstruction methods can sometimes take weeks of computation time on a normal PC.
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Here's a look inside the case:

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