nVidia's Tesla

[slayerza]

Ho guys,
I found an interessting little bit of info the other day about the nVidia tesla. This is a GPU designed specifically for scientific and engineering computations that could benifit from parallel processings. Reported to be capable of 2000 GFLOPS/s (one unit) that poses interessting questions to the strength of encryption algorithms.

Although there is clusters capable of the same (or higher) performance, this is a single contained device with a small and compact form factor.

Any thoughts?
Cheers,
Slayer

 

[ID10T]

?

 

[HavocXphere]

Any thoughts?

Yes, where is the link?

AFAIK it can only do certain calcs at high speed/many flops (Otherwise intel would have done that long ago).

Works well for projects like Folding@Home etc.

 

[Nod]

http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla_computing_solutions.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVIDIA_Tesla

Google is your friend

 

[11masoodt]

any reviews?

 

[qinglung]

This is a GPU designed specifically for scientific and engineering computations that could benifit from parallel processings.

Even with the 8800 series cards it's already possible to do this, it's just a matter of redefining your problem in terms of instructions that the GPU would understand... which is not always that easy to do, probably why it is not used that widely at the moment.

 

[slayerza]

True, you can allready achieve this with existing GFX cards, but with the tesla being dedicated it means that you cannot use it as a gfx card. As I mentioned the use of this is simply a condenced computing cluster, and as such the same problems associated with typical parallel distributed computing still applies.
This might be more user frindly for varsities than building a dedicated cluster of 64 dual core machines.

 

[11masoodt]

can u run games with this gfx?

 

[qinglung]

True, you can allready achieve this with existing GFX cards, but with the tesla being dedicated it means that you cannot use it as a gfx card.

Don't tell the varsities that, I'm sure students will appreciate it much more if they get the normal GFX cards for "scientific" purposes

 

[slayerza]

Given the choice I would choose a graphics card (for Vista's req offcourse) and a TESLA for the real number crunching.