Expanding the boundaries of GPU computing

Graphics processing units (GPUs) were originally designed to make the massive calculations required for rendering 3D images to a display. Because of the nature of processing and creating images today, GPUs must have a large number of cores that work in parallel to render models in photo-realistic detail. The growth of the gaming market — both for PCs and for gaming consoles — has driven a rapid pace of technological improvement, while the commodity nature of the gaming market has helped reduce the price of GPUs.

The ability to deliver dramatic increases in compute performance at a reduced cost has positioned GPU computing at the forefront of the next wave of high-performance computing (HPC) architecture adoption. Now, Dell is helping make GPU processing power even more accessible through the Dell™ PowerEdge™ C410x PCI Express (PCIe) expansion chassis, which enables organizations to connect servers through the appropriate host interface card to up to 16 external GPU cards. On the measure of peak single-precision floating point performance, a PowerEdge C410x with 16 NVIDIA® Tesla™ M2050 GPU modules can deliver up to 16.5 TFLOPS of computing output.

In HPC environments, GPU computing offers one of today’s most powerful computational technologies on a price/performance basis. To help organizations extend their use of GPU computing, Dell offers IT consulting services, rack integration, on-site deployment, and support services for organizations deploying and using GPU-based Dell systems. Taking advantage of these services and systems like the PowerEdge C410x expansion chassis can help organizations dramatically increase performance while maximizing efficiency.

Also included: How the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is taking advantage of the cost economies and performance of GPUs to drive a 47 TFLOPS peak computing cluster