The Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) has collaborated with Nvidia to use Nvidia Tesla GPUs to boost the computational horsepower of its TSUBAME supercomputer.
Through the addition of 170 Tesla S1070 1U systems, the TSUBAME supercomputer now delivers nearly 170TFlops of theoretical peak performance, as well as 77.48TFlops of measured Linpack performance, placing it amongst the top ranks in the world’s Top 500 Supercomputers.
‘Tokyo Tech is constantly investigating future computing platforms and it had become clear to us that to make the next major leap in performance, TSUBAME had to adopt GPU computing technologies,’ said Satoshi Matsuoka, division director of the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center at Tokyo Tech. ‘In testing our key applications, the Tesla GPUs delivered speed-ups that we had never seen before, sometimes even orders of magnitude – a tremendous competitive boost for our scientists and engineers in reducing their time to solution.’
Matsuoka continued: ‘The entire upgrade was carried out in one week, and the TSUBAME supercomputer remained live throughout. This is an unprecedented feat in top-level supercomputing.’
The first to achieve Top 500 ranking with an Nvidia Tesla based GPU cluster, Tokyo Tech is one of hundreds of distinguished universities and supercomputing centres that have adopted GPU based solutions for research. Other leading centres include the National Center of Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, Rice University, University of Heidelberg, University of Maryland, Max Planck Institute and University of North Carolina.
The Tesla S1070 1U GPU system is based on the Nvidia CUDA parallel architecture. This architecture is accessible through an industry standard C language programming environment that allows developers and researchers to tap into the parallel architecture of the GPU quickly and easily.
