Nvidia continues to find new homes for its Tesla GPUs.
The graphics chip maker Aug. 3 announced that Hewlett-Packard is now
offering its Z800 Workstation with up to two Tesla GPUs aimed at the
HPC (high-performance computing) space.
Nvidia officials see the embrace by HP as the latest indication of the growing demand for GPUs in the HPC field.
“The adoption of Tesla GPUs is the fastest of any new processor
technology in the history of HPC,” Andy Keane, general manager of the
Tesla business, said in a statement.
Nvidia officials noted that a supercomputer at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, called Tsubame, is the 41st
fastest computer in the world, according to compilers of the Top500
list of the most powerful supercomputers, released in June. Tsubame
includes GT200 GPUs from Nvidia.
HPC hardware vendors are looking to find ways to get graphics
technology into their offerings. For example, Appro in May rolled out
its HyperPower Cluster, an HPC offering that combines Intel’s new quad-core Xeon 5500 Series “Nehalem EP” and Nvidia’s Tesla processor.
Appro officials credited Nvidia’s aggressive marketing of its GPU
offerings for growing the market for graphics chips in mainstream
systems. GPUs offer the promise of enabling businesses to run their
code faster than traditional x86 processors.
Other vendors also are pushing graphics chips. Advanced Micro
Devices bought GPU maker ATI for $5.4 billion in 2006. AMD officials
announced May 6 that they were merging its chips and graphics
businesses. President and CEO Dirk Meyer has said combining AMD’s CPU and GPU businesses is a key differentiator for the company.
AMD rival Intel will offer integrated graphics in its upcoming CPUs, and is working on its own GP-GPU chip, codenamed “Larrabee.”
Nvidia officials, pointing to the HP workstation deal, said the
Tesla GPUs will enable businesses to run high computational workloads
on their desktop systems.
/ 4 
Desktops and Notebooks News & Reviews 
