FASTRA II Puts 13 GPUs In a Desktop Supercomputer

An anonymous reader writes "Last year tomography researchers of the ASTRA group at the University of Antwerp developed a desktop supercomputer with four NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics cards. The performance of the FASTRA GPGPU system was amazing; it was slightly faster than the university's 512-core supercomputer and cost less than 4000EUR. Today the researchers announce FASTRA II, a new 6000EUR GPGPU computing beast with six dual-GPU NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 graphics cards and one GeForce GTX 275. The development of the new system was more complicated and there are still some stability issues, but tests reveal the 13 GPUs deliver 3.75x more performance than the old system. For the tomography reconstruction calculations these researchers need to do, the compact FASTRA II is four times faster than the university's supercomputer cluster, while being roughly 300 times more energy efficient."

Awesome

[enderjsv]

Almost meets the minimum requirements for Crysis 2

More Awesome

[copponex]

This was post #2 and already modded -1, Redundant.

Re:Awesome

[sadness203]

Only if you imagine a beowolf cluster of these
Here goes the redundant and offtopic mod.

News Flash

[RandomUsr]

Blazing Fast Pron Machine running Windows Vista. Don't forget to pick a copy of the latest memory intensive Anti-Virus, as this machine will handle it just fine.

Re:Easy money to be made?

[daVinci1980]

You must be new here... ;)

Re:More Awesome

[joocemann]

slashdot mods are often, as I observe, sour and pissy skeptics. even if it is humorous to them they will knock it for lack of something else to bash.

times less

[Tubal-Cain]

...consuming 300 times less power.

*sigh*

Stability problem solved...

[gsgriffin]

Duh! Look at the number of GPU's...13...try 12 or 14 and your luck will change.

Re:More Awesome

[joocemann]

slashdot mods are often, as I observe, sour and pissy skeptics. even if it is humorous to them they will knock it for lack of something else to bash.

-1 troll

lol. exactly

Re:Easy money to be made?

[nurb432]

Does that come in a picoATX version?

Re:Not sure how fast it is, but I know it is hot..

[thedarknite]

I've got a pair of 9800gx2 in my rig. The cards turn room temperature air into ~46C air. Without proper ventilation, these things will turn a chassis into an easy bake oven.

That's a brilliant idea, now people can make snacks without ever leaving the computer.

Re:times less

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

...consuming 300 times less power. *sigh*

Oops. Sorry. 300 times fewer.