Oak Ridge National Laboratory has officially bitten the GPU bug. Following John’s overview of the new Fermi chip, we find Dr. Jeff Nichols, computational director at ORNL, standing foot to foot with NVIDIA’s CEO.
This is BIG news. ORNL is interested in very large, leadership class supercomputing platforms directed towards ingesting the workloads of a many scientists. Hence, they depend on production computing. Their support of GPU computing has the ability to launch the technology into the next dimension of computing.
Nichols also mentioned that ORNL is spearheading what he calls the Hybrid Multicore consortium. Long story short, NVIDIA’s new Fermi GPUs have the backing of one of the largest collection of computational talent in the world.