Introducing the world's first personal supercomputer
The world's first personal
supercomputer, which is 250 times faster than the average PC, has been unveiled.
Although at £4,000 it is beyond the reach of most consumers, the
high-performance processor could become invaluable to universities and medical
institutions.
The revolutionary Tesla supercomputer was launched in London yesterday evening.
The NVIDIA's Tesla computer could prove invaluable to medical researchers and
accelerate the discovery of cancer treatments
The desktop workstations are built with innovative NVIDIA graphics processing
units (GPUs), which are capable of handling simultaneous calculations usually
relegated to £70,000 supercomputing 'clusters' that take up entire rooms.
PHD students at Cambridge and Oxford Universities and MIT in America are already
using GPU-based personal supercomputers for research.
Scientists believe the new systems could help find cures for diseases.
1954: The IBM 704 was considered to be the world's first super-computer and took
up a whole room designed for engineering and scientific calculations.
The device lets them run hundreds of thousands of science codes to create a
shortlist of drugs that are most likely to offer potential cures.
This exceptional speedup has the ability to accelerate the discovery of
potentially life-saving anti-cancer drugs,' said Jack Collins from the Advanced
Biomedical Computing Centre in Maryland.
The new computers make innovative use of the revolutionary graphics processing
units, which NIVIDA claims could bring lightning speeds to the next generation
of home computers.
" A traditional processor handles one task at a time in a linear style, but GPUs
work on tasks simultaneously to do things such as get colour pixels together on
screens to present moving images "
" So while downloading a film onto an iPod would take up to six hours on a
traditional system, a graphics card could bring this down to 20 minutes. "
The supercomputers, made by a number of UK based companies including Viglen,
Armari and Dell are currently on sale to universities and to the science and
research community.
PC maker Dell said they would soon be mass producing them for the general
consumer market.