U of Antwerp GPU-based desktop super packs in 12 TFLOPS

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

NetworkWorld.com ran a story yesterday about a new personal high performance computer built by the University of Antwerp. The computer gets its power from GPUs, and it a refinement of an earlier design that had 4 dual-GPUs in it

By comparison, the Fastra II has a total of 13 graphical processing units (six NVIDIA GTX295 dual-GPU cards and a single GTX275 single-GPU card). All this gives the Fastra II 12 teraflops of computing power (12 trillion floating-point operations per second).

The system costs about $8,800 US to build, and is used by researchers at the university to support 3D bone scanning equipment

The University’s researchers had to make some modifications to the components to create Fastra II, including a custom case to hold all of the graphics cards above the motherboard, a custom BIOS, and a customized Linux kernel (since an ordinary 32-bit BIOS couldn’t handle all of the graphics cards simultaneously). The Fastra II is still under development and future developments can be found at the official Web site.