New Supercomputing from Nvidia including Tesla K40 announced at SC3

Nvidia made several major announcements at the Supercomputing (SC13) conference today in Denver with these three standing out:

1) IBM and Nvidia Partner to Build Next-Generation Supercomputers

2) Nvidia launches the Tesla K40 GPU Accelerator, the World’s Fastest Accelerator for Supercomputing and Big Data Analytics

3) New Supercomputer Announcements

Nvidia and IBM will collaborate on GPU-accelerated versions of IBM’s wide portfolio of enterprise software applications on IBM Power Systems.  This signals that GPU accelerator technology will move beyond the realm of supercomputing and into the heart of enterprise-scale data centers. The collaboration aims to enable IBM customers to more rapidly process, secure and analyze massive volumes of streaming data.

Companies to Integrate POWER Processor, Tesla GPUs

Nvidia and IBM also plan to integrate the joint-processing capabilities of Nvidia Tesla GPUs with IBM POWER processors. The move makes it easier and more efficient for a wider range of companies to employ a style of supercomputing hardware used primarily by the scientific and technical communities for computing tasks like space exploration, decoding the human genome and speeding new products to market.

By combining IBM POWER8 CPUs with the world’s highest-performance and most energy-efficient GPU accelerators, the companies aim to deliver a new class of technology that maximizes performance and efficiency for all types of scientific, engineering, big data analytics and other high performance computing (HPC) workloads.

IBM Power Systems will fully support existing scientific, engineering and visualization applications developed with the Nvidia CUDA programming model, allowing supercomputing centers and HPC customers to immediately take advantage of groundbreaking performance advantages. IBM also plans to make its Rational brand of enterprise software development tools available to supercomputing developers, making it easier for programmers to develop cutting-edge applications.

The partnership between Nvidia and IBM builds on the August announcement of the OpenPOWER Consortium, in which IBM, Nvidia, Google, Mellanox and Tyan aim to establish an open ecosystem based on IBM’s POWER architecture.

Tesla K40

Also from SC13, Nvidia today unveiled the Tesla K40 GPU accelerator, the world’s highest performance accelerator ever built, delivering extreme performance to a widening range of scientific, engineering, high performance computing (HPC) and enterprise applications.

Providing double the memory and up to 40 percent higher performance than its predecessor, the Tesla K20X GPU accelerator, and 10 times higher performance than today’s fastest CPU, the Tesla K40 GPU is the world’s first and highest-performance accelerator optimized for big data analytics and large-scale scientific workloads.

Just like with the GTX 700 series GPUs, the Tesla K40 features intelligent Nvidia GPU Boost technology, which converts power headroom into a user-controlled performance boost, enabling users to unlock the untapped performance of a broad range of applications.  Here is the K20X compared with the K40 at base and boost clocks.

Ultimate Performance for Science, Big Data

Based on the Kepler compute architecture, the Tesla K40 GPU accelerator surpasses all other accelerators on two common measures of computational performance: 4.29 teraflops single-precision and 1.43 teraflops double-precision peak floating point performance.

Key features of the Tesla K40 GPU accelerator include:

• 12GB of ultra-fast GDDR5 memory allows users to process 2X larger datasets, enabling them to rapidly analyze massive volumes of data.
• 2,880 CUDA® parallel processing cores deliver application acceleration by up to 10X compared to using a CPU alone.
• Dynamic Parallelism enables GPU threads to dynamically spawn new threads, enabling users to quickly and easily crunch through adaptive and dynamic data structures.
• PCIe Gen-3 interconnect support accelerates data movement by 2X compared to PCIe Gen-2 technology.

More information about the Tesla K40 GPU accelerator is available at Nvidia booth 613 at SC13, Nov. 18-21, and on the high performance computing website. To learn more about CUDA or download the latest version, visit the CUDA website.

Users can also try the Tesla K40 GPU accelerator for free on remotely hosted clusters. Visit the GPU Test Drive website for more information.

Availability

The Tesla K40 GPU accelerator is available now from a variety of server manufacturers, including Appro, ASUS, Bull, Cray, Dell, Eurotech, HP, IBM, Inspur, SGI, Sugon, Supermicro and Tyan, as well as from Nvidia’s reseller partners.

New Supercomputer announcements

In a related announcement, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin — one of the leading advanced computing centers in the United States — plans to deploy “Maverick,” a new interactive, remote visualization and data analysis system powered Tesla K40 GPU accelerators in January, 2014.

Nvidia GPUs will also power Europe’s fastest and greenest new Supercomputer just as it does the Titan in the USA at Oakridge.Another look at Piz Diant.We wish ABT could be in Denver but we hope to be at the GTC in March.

There is much coming up from ABT.  Tomorrow morning we will have a brand new game performance evaluation!

Happy gaming … and supercomputing!