The Hindu Business Line : Supercomputing made easier, cheaper

New-gen supercomputer: Mr Jen-Hsun Huang, Co-founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of NVIDIA Corp, launching the new generation GPU-based Tesla Personal Supercomputer at IIIT in Hyderabad on Wednesday. –

Our Bureau

Hyderabad, Nov. 19 Supercomputing will no more be a costly, power-intensive and space consuming affair. Your desktop computer could be your next supercomputer, if it is powered by NVIDIA’s graphics processing unit (GPU).

Why, it can even be assembled locally and plugged into the normal power socket at your home. The CPU is no bigger than the typical CPU that sits next to your monitor.

Armed with the parallel processing technology of GPU, the NVIDIA Tesla Personal Supercomputer offers a performance that is 250 times more than what a standard PC could deliver.

No wonder then computer manufacturers such as Dell, Lenova and HP have decided to use the technology.

$500-m spend

Showcasing the Tesla Personal Supercomputer here on Wednesday, Mr Jen-Hsun Huang, President and Chief Executive Officer of NVIDIA Corporation, said the company had spent $500 million to develop the processor, which would change the way computers process data.

The technology would be of great help to scientific, academic and medical communities to carry out difficult computation of data in their research activities.

Built on the CUDA computing architecture, the GPU processor has accelerated computing by at least 10 years, he said. “This will help the users to address the computing problems that couldn’t be tackled earlier.”

Mr Huang was here to inaugurate NVIDIA Visual Computing Lab at Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT).

The laboratory would provide the students with the latest equipment and software licences to further the research in the field of GPU engineering and visual computing.

Fellowship awards

He also announced the CUDA Fellowship Awards programme. Prof. P J Narayan, Dean of Centre of Visual Information Technology at IIIT, has been awarded the first ever fellowship. Meanwhile, Connoiseur Electronics Pvt Ltd has announced the availability of NVIDIA Tesla Personal Supercomputer in India at a starting price point of Rs 1.55 lakh. These supercomputers could cost up to Rs 5 lakh.