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[Reuenthal]

http://www.economist.com/news/scien...st-computer-thanks-video-games-deeper-thought

SPEED fanatics that they are, computer nerds like to check the website of Top500, a collaboration between German and American computer scientists that keeps tabs on which of the world’s supercomputers is the fastest. On November 12th the website released its latest list, and unveiled a new champion.

Titan has an unusual design, too. All supercomputers are composed of thousands of processor chips harnessed together. Often, these are derivatives of the central processing units, or CPUs, that sit at the heart of modern, desktop machines. But Titan derives the majority of its oomph—more than 90%—from technology originally developed for the video-game industry. Half of its 37,376 processors are ordinary CPUs. But the other half are graphics processing units, or GPUs. These are specialised devices designed to cope with modern video games, which are some of the most demanding applications any home machine is ever likely to run. China’s “TianHe-1” machine, a previous Top500 champion, was built in the same way, as are 60 other machines in the Top500 list.

Parallel worlds

Broadly speaking, a CPU—which will be expected to run everything from spreadsheets to voice-recognition software to encoded video—has to be a generalist, competent at every sort of mathematical task but excelling at nothing. A GPU, by contrast, is designed to excel at one thing only: manipulating huge numbers of the triangles out of which all modern computer graphics are made.

Several years ago researchers at Nvidia and AMD (the two companies that produce most of the world’s high-performance GPUs) realised that many scientific problems which demand huge amounts of computing power—everything from climate simulations and modelling combustion in an engine to seismic analysis for the oil-and-gas industry—could be translated into a form that was digestible by their GPUs. Soon after, supercomputer builders such as Cray (which put Titan together using Nvidia’s GPUs) began to take notice.

Borrowing from the games industry in this way brings several benefits. One big one is efficiency. Titan is an upgrade of Oak Ridge’s existing “Jaguar” machine. Upgrading Jaguar with ordinary CPUs would have meant building a computer that sucked around 30MW of electricity when running flat out—enough juice to power a small town. Because GPUs are so good at their specialised tasks, Titan can achieve its blistering performance while sipping a (relatively) modest 8.2MW.

It makes sense financially, too, says Sumit Gupta, head of supercomputing at Nvidia. The chips that the firm sells to supercomputer-makers are almost identical to those it sells to gamers. As Dr Gupta observes, “The history of high-performance computing is littered with the bodies of firms that tried to build products just for the supercomputing market. By itself, it’s just too small a niche.”

Not all problems are susceptible to being chopped up in such a way, though (hiring a dozen barbers, to take another analogy, is unlikely to speed up a haircut significantly). The requirement to translate a problem into the sort of mathematics that a GPU can digest adds another barrier. Dr Gupta gives the example of the models used to simulate how a car will react in a crash as one problem that has so far resisted what the industry calls the “massively parallel” approach. Clever programmers can sometimes find a way around such issues: ray-tracing, a high-quality, mathematically intense approach to computer graphics that aims to simulate individual light rays, was, ironically, long thought to be the kind of problem that a modern GPU would struggle with. Yet at a graphics conference in 2008, a group of researchers from Nvidia announced that they had, nevertheless, found a way to do it.

 

[Danny Dudekisser]

But can it run Crysis?

 

[2San]

But can it run Crysis?

Pretty sure it was developed for the sole purpose to run Crysis.

 

[King_Moc]

But can it run Crysis?

Pretty sure it was developed for the sole purpose to run Crysis.

I heard it can get 50-55fps in 1080p.

 

[Danny Dudekisser]

I heard it can get 50-55fps in 1080p.

But can it run Crysis with AA?

 

[King_Moc]

But can it run Crysis with AA?

2x, but no more

 

[Row]

Looking at the Farcry 3 benchmarks this thing might be able to crack 60fps

 

[Little Old Man]

Equivalent to 10,000 360s, or 20,000 WiiUs.

 

[chertipros]

pshhh I bet the PS4 is gonna smoke this thing

 

[Ahasverus]

Equivalent to 10,000 360s, or 20,000 WiiUs.

Ice cold.

 

[Dresden]

Let's see how it handles with more than ten NPCs on screen.

 

[DBT85]

Equivalent to 10,000 360s, or 20,000 WiiUs.

got a laugh out of me.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

Let's see how it handles with more than ten NPCs on screen.

I just want to see if it lags during real-time weapon change.

 

[King_Moc]

No blast processing, no sale.

 

[Atomski]

I live not far from where they have this. I should break in and install some games.

 

[SapientWolf]

“The history of high-performance computing is littered with the bodies of firms that tried to build products just for the supercomputing market. By itself, it’s just too small a niche.”

 

[demidar]

Looks like the Wii U pro controller.

 

[Vulcano's assistant]

Equivalent to 10,000 360s, or 20,000 WiiUs.

No



















23,255 WiiUs

 

[Robot Pants]

Equivalent to 10,000 360s, or 20,000 WiiUs.

 

[ArjanN]

Equivalent to 10,000 360s, or 20,000 WiiUs.

So 80,000 Gamecubes duct taped together.

 

[Interficium]

Equivalent to 10,000 360s, or 20,000 WiiUs.

SO ICY.