jmke

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 medical researchers ran some benchmarks and found that in some cases their 4000EUR desktop superPC outperforms CalcUA, a supercomputer with 512 AMD Opteron cores that cost the University of Antwerp 3.5 million euro in March 2005 (src: DVHardware.net)

Check out the video: mms://video.ua.ac.be/SijbersJan/Eng.wmv

And more videos/pics/details at: http://fastra.ua.ac.be/en/index.html

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wutske

nerd

Nice project tough , I'm curious how they managed to get it working (driver-wise) and how they managed to make it so quiet (I can't even hear the computer on the video).

jmke

running idle the 9800GX2 cards are far from noisy; the CPU is cooled by low noise 120mm fans;
driver wise the cards are each running individually, no SLI, as long as you got spare PCI Express slots, you can add more videocards, they were limited by the mainboard here. CUDA works in parallel over these GPUs without the need for SLI

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geoffrey

Should we buy NVIDIA stock now?

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Massman

I think so, CUDA really is impressive

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Rutar

NV stock suddenly has become VERY interesting for me now

wutske

Yes it does, I'm thinking about trying it out when I have the money to buy a new pc. Maybe if I'm lucky then my GeForce Go7300 supports CUDA too, but I'm afraid it won't (especialy since nV doesn't even offer drivers for that card )

jmke

8 series only

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