Supercomputers weren’t named just for their size, but when most supercomputers covers hundreds of square feet, scientists in Belgium have built a supercomputer in a regular PC case that can master up to 12 Teraflops. FASTRA II is the successor to ASTRA we reported on back in June 2008 and just like then it’s graphics circuits that makes this possible, thirteen to be exact.
The researchers at Vision Lab of University of Antwerp have succeeded in installing no less than six dual-GPU NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 graphics cards together with a single GeForce GTX 275 graphics card in a single system.
The motherboard is ASUS SuperComputer that sports seven PCI Express x16 slots, but also have specially tailored BIOS to make the graphics cards work better together.
For suitable applications, a single GPU already has the computing power equivalent to a moderate CPU cluster. In collaboration with Tones.be and ASUS, We have now developed a PC design that incorporates 13 GPUs, resulting in a massive 12TFLOPS of computing power.
The system costs around 6000 Euro to build, which can sound like a lot, but it’s really not when you look at the size and performance of FASTRA II.
