New Fastra II to pack 13 graphics cards

19th December, 2009 by adina
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The University of Antwerp has recently presented one of the fastest computers ever, as they say, to fit into a regular tower chassis. The PC, called Fastra II, has a 2.66GHz Core i7 main processor and uses several graphics cards, in order to offer the performance that would require, in normal conditions, a cluster. Six dual-GPU GeForce GTX 295 cards are combined with a GeForce GTX 275 provide 13GPUs in one single desktop. The NVIDIA cards are able to accelerate CUDA and other normal computing tasks; the sheer parallelism will allow the computer to handle up to 12 teraflops of general work and 3D graphics.

The Belgian school sustains that the computer is four times faster than the initial Fastra and a 512-core normal computing cluster. The system should be used for tomography or for creating 3D images of bones and organs from X-ray images, which could recreate missing parts in patients.

Despite its speed, the system runs on primarily off-the-shelf components and has an ASUS P6T7 WS mainboard to be compatible with all video cards. The extreme power is maintained by one main 1,500W power supply and three secondary 450W supplies. The computer also benefits from a 1TB Samsung HDD, 12GB of DDR3 memory and a Lian Li case. Some modifications made include a cage for the GeForce Boards and a custom kernel for the CentOS Linux build.

The system can be obtained for about $8,791, the equivalent for 6,000 euros.


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