NVIDIA Announces Tesla K40 GPU Accelerator and IBM Partnership In Supercomputing 59
MojoKid writes "The supercomputing conference SC13 kicks off this week and Nvidia is kicking off their own event with the launch of a new GPU and a strategic partnership with IBM. Just as the GTX 780 Ti was the full consumer implementation of the GK110 GPU, the new K40 Tesla card is the supercomputing / HPC variant of the same core architecture. The K40 picks up additional clock headroom and implements the same variable clock speed threshold that has characterized Nvidia's consumer cards for the past year, for a significant overall boost in performance. The other major shift between Nvidia's previous gen K20X and the new K40 is the amount of on-board RAM. K40 packs a full 12GB and clocks it modestly higher to boot. That's important because datasets are typically limited to on-board GPU memory (at least, if you want to work with any kind of speed). Finally, IBM and Nvidia announced a partnership to combine Tesla GPUs and Power CPUs for OpenPOWER solutions. The goal is to push the new Tesla cards as workload accelerators for specific datacenter tasks. According to Nvidia's release, Tesla GPUs will ship alongside Power8 CPUs, which are currently scheduled for a mid-2014 release date. IBM's venerable architecture is expected to target a 4GHz clock speed and offer up to 12 cores with 96MB of shared L3 cache. A 12-core implementation would be capable of handling up to 96 simultaneous threads. The two should make for a potent combination."
Anyone remember the Cray? (Score:4, Interesting)
Ah, the good old days.... when CPUs were measured in megahertz, and instructions took multiple clocks. :D
Really, what was the Cray when it first came out? One vector processing unit. How many does this new NVidia board have? How much faster are they than the original Cray?
Re:What about OpenCL 1.2 support? (Score:2, Interesting)
"CUDA vs. OpenCL seems to be an example of the ongoing battle between an entrenched and supported; but costly, proprietary implementation, vs. a somewhat patchy solution that isn't as mature; but has basically everybody except Nvidia rooting for it."
Wishful thinking. Intel doesn't give a crap about OpenCL, they don't even expose their GPU's for OpenCL under Linux, and as I mentioned AMD are betting on Mantle. As for "costly", there's nothing about CUDA that is costly that isn't costly with OpenCL
Mantle is far more than just a Glide-like API. It covers both graphics and GPGPU, effectively replacing OpenCL on the AMD side(unfortunately, that still comes with AMD idiocy in how to access interfaces etc..... grrrr..)
Re:What about OpenCL 1.2 support? (Score:4, Interesting)
Mantle is less an open specification than CUDA is, CUDA does have a full x86 implementation available which is mostly slower due the CPU not taking too much advantage of the massive parallelism of the GPU (not sure about how this play out with Xeon Phi).
Mantle on the other hand is a very low level Graphics API that basically exposes SW to some low level interactions with AMD's GPU. It's more like GLIDE than OpenCL. From what I've seen so far it's not clear to me Mantle will be very portable across several AMD generations. It works for GCN based cards out now but who knows if it will be fast for GCN++ without a major rewrite of the application. NVIDIA could implement Mantle but would probably have to translate so much stuff in SW to make it work you'd lose the low SW overhead.
From the one or two talks I listened to Mantle seems to basically expose the same interface the driver developers have access to and lets you go to town. This is great for the latest architecture but now it's up to your application to evolve as the HW does. There's a whole lot of work being done to optimize for each architecture release in the driver which allow older games that the publisher doesn't really want to support anymore to work and see performance boosts.