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Nvidia's GPUs will help power exascale super computers
The US military are serious gamers
By Rob Coppinger
Tue Aug 10 2010, 14:36
THE US MILITARY is giving Nvidia money to progress GPU technologies for
supercomputers that will be 1,000-times more powerful than today's.
Prototypes of the super duper computers are to be completed by 2018 for the
four-year long Ubiquitous High Performance Computing program that has
awarded Nvidia's team $25 million. But surely 2010 plus four is 2014? The super
duper computers, whose maths are hopefully better than the project's leaders,
are so super that their operations will be measured on the exa-scale, meaning
10 to the power of 18. Tera is mere piffle at 10 to the power of 12.
Each team will develop new software and hardware to overcome the limitations
of conventional computing to achieve the 1,000 times increase in computation
speed while being 50 times more energy efficient. They also aim to improve
reliability, but does anyone believe the BSOD is not going to make an
appearance?
"We look forward to collaborating to develop programmable, scalable systems
that operate in tight power budgets and deliver increases in performances that
are many orders of magnitude above today's systems," said Bill Dally, Nvidia's
chief scientist and the team's principal investigator. Well, maybe one person. µ
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