World's fastest personal supercomputer unveiled

[dwarakesh]

An American company has unveiled the world's first personal supercomputer, which is 250 times faster than the average PCs. David Kirk, chief scientist at the company NVIDIA, has revealed that the Tesla supercomputers will go on sale for more than 4,000 pounds.

Most consumers may consider that amount very hefty, but the company says that it is just a tiny fraction of what computers with similar capabilities usually cost. The designers of the novel supercomputer believe that it should be able to help doctors process the results for brain and body scans much more quickly, allowing them to tell patients within hours instead of days whether they have a tumour.

Scientists also hope that they will be able to find cures for cancer and malaria faster than traditional research, as the novel personal supercomputer would enable them to run hundreds of thousands of simulations to create a shortlist of the most potent drugs.

"Pretty much anything that you do on your PC that takes a lot of time can be accelerated with this," Times Online quoted David Kirk, chief scientist at NVIDIA, as saying. Unlike previous supercomputers that needed huge rooms for installation, Tesla personal supercomputers will look like the PC that many people already have in their homes.

"These supercomputers can improve the time it takes to process information by 1,000 times. If you imagine it takes a week to get a result [from running an experiment], you can only do it 52 times a year. If it takes you minutes, you can do it constantly, and learn just as much in a day," Dr Kirk said. The new computers make innovative use of graphics processing units (GPUs).

They were first launched in the U.S. last month, and became available to British customers on December 4. Tesla supercomputers will initially be sold to the scientific and research community and universities. The PC maker Dell said that it would soon be mass-producing them for the general consumer market.

[dwarakesh]

Tesla is world's first personal supercomputer

Scientists have developed the world's first personal supercomputer, 25 times faster than the average PC -- a technological breakthrough, which could bring "lightning speeds" to the next generation of home computers.

The Tesla supercomputer, designed by US-based company NVIDIA, is priced between 4,000 pounds and 8,000 pounds, and looks much like an ordinary PC.

According to the scientists, the new machine will revolutionise the way researchers and medical professionals carry out their work, for instance, it would allow doctors to process the results of brain and body scans much more quickly and tell patients within hours whether they have a tumour.

David Kirk, the chief scientist at NVIDIA, said: "Pretty much anything that you do on your PC that takes a lot of time can be accelerated with this. These supercomputers can improve the time it takes to process info by 1,000 times.

"If you imagine it takes a week to get a result (from running an experiment), you can only do it 52 times a year. If it takes you minutes, you can do it constantly, and learn just as much in a day."

Moreover, according to the scientists, the machine could help researchers discover cures for diseases, such as cancer and malaria, much more quickly than using traditional research methods.

This is because the device lets them run hundreds of thousands of simulations to create a shortlist of the drugs that are most likely to offer the potential for a cure.

[dwarakesh]

8 Indian supercomps in world's top 500 list

Hewlett Packard (HP), the world's biggest maker of personal computers, on Friday said that a total of eight entries in the list of top  500 supercomputers are from India and six out of the eight entries are from HP. Among vendors, HP leads the list with a 41.8 % share of the systems, followed by IBM (37%), Dell (4%) and Cray (4%).

Supercomputer Eka, a HP-based system with a performance of 132.8 teraflops (floating point operations per second) has been ranked at number 13. Eka belongs to the Tata Group's Computational Research Laboratories.

The rankings are released twice a year by researchers at the Universities of Tennessee and Mannheim, Germany, and at NERSC Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The HP-based Param cluster of the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing has been ranked 68th.

The other supercomputers by HP from India are for an industrial research company (334), a research agency (428), IIT-Madras (436) and Paprikaas Interactive Services (478).

The two other supercomputers from India out of the eight in the list include IBM's eServer Blue Gene Solution for Indian Institute Science ranked at 213 and a supercomputer for Digital Media Company (G) ranked at 481.

IBM's Roadrunner has been ranked as number one in the list. The system, only the second to break the petaflop barrier, posted a top performance of 1.059 petaflops. One petaflop represents one quadrillion floating point operations per second.