Barton's Blog

While the name GPGPU, which stands for General-purpose computing on graphics processing units, doesn’t flow lyrically off the tongue, it’s an extremely powerful concept.

What’s the big idea?

The idea behind this sexy five letter acronym is to take a graphical process unit (GPU) and expand its use beyond graphics.  Through the “simple” addition of programmable stages and higher precision arithmetic to the rendering pipelines, the GPU is able to tackle general computing and off load it from the CPU.

So what does this mean and/or why should you care?  Well the connection of GPGPUs to servers bring about ginormous increases in performance helping to make HPC and scaled-out deployments wicked fast.  This works particularly well when you’re talking about modeling, simulation, imaging, signal processing, gaming etc.  Not only can the addition of GPGPUs boost these processes by one or two orders of magnitude but it does so much more cost effectively than by simply adding servers.

What is Dell’s DCS group offering up?

The Data Center Solutions (DCS) team have an Oil & Gas customer that is always looking to push the envelope when it comes to getting the most out of GPGPU’s in order to deliver seismic mapping results faster.  One of the best ways to do this is by increasing the GPU to server ratio.  In the market today, there are a variety of servers that have 1-2 internal GPUs and there is a PCIe expansion chassis that has 4 GPUs.

What we announced today is the PowerEdge C410x PCIe expansion chassis, the first PCIe expansion chassis to connect 1-8 servers to 1-16 GPUs.  This chassis enables massive parallel calculations separate from the server, adding up to 16.48 teraflops of computational power to a datacenter.

But enough of my typing, see for yourself in the overview/walk-thru below starring DCS’s very own Joe Sekel, the architect behind the C410x.

Extra-credit reading

• A customer takes possession of his C410X: Schlepping a 410x across Austin – A documentary
• Blog from our GM about today’s announcement: Paving the way for powerful thinkers
• Blog: Deep dive tour(s) of the PowerEdge C410x
• Blog: PowerEdge C410x — Whiteboard topology
• The Register: PowerEdge snuggles with fast GPUs and fat SSDs
• Scientific Computing: GPGPUs Invade Supercomputing

Pau for now…

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 5th, 2010 at 9:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.