NVIDIA HPC future directions

Where is NVIDIA heading with High Performance Computing hardware? Ever since Intel announced Xeon Phi Knights Landing as a stand-alone processor integrated at the board level as a full compute unit, I’ve been wondering what NVIDIA would do along these lines. It just makes sense that they would do something similar since getting the GPU off of the PCIe bus and tightly integrated with plentiful system memory would be a huge step forward for usability and performance. Here’s my guess about where NVIDIA is heading.

GTC 2014 Brief Recap — content links

I had the pleasure of attending the NVIDIA Graphics Technology Conference ( GTC ) last week. Wonderful conference! If you have any doubts about the quality of the conference you are in luck. They have most of the content on-line, you can check it out yourself …

Compute Performance: Ivy Bridge-E vs. Haswell

How does the Ivy Bridge-E Core i7-4960X (Extreme edition) do against the Haswell Core i7-4770 running the Linpack benchmark? The Ivy Bridge-E 4960X is a great processor — 6 cores, 4GHz max turbo clock, 4 memory channels, 40 PCIe lanes, big price tag … However, the humble Haswell 4770 has it’s AVX2 and FMA3 secret weapons which are really effective on linear/matrix algebra type of numerical computing problems. …

The Peak Mini NVIDIA Tesla edition –preview

The NVIDIA Tesla accelerator is a well established work-horse for many useful and important High Performance Computing applications and we are happy to be able to provide Tesla acceleration for our “Peak” systems. The developer ecosystem around CUDA is well established, however, at Puget Systems we believe there is new round of developer interest on the horizon that will be catalyzed by the soon to be released 6.x series of the CUDA platform, advances with openACC, new libraries, new hardware, and perhaps significantly, NVIDIA’s acquisition of The Portland Group and their excellent compilers and tools for working with Tesla. So, I’ve loaded up a Peak mini with a Tesla K40 and I’m ready to give Tesla programming a fresh look.

Xeon Phi Developers Starter Kit

If you are thinking about getting a system for doing development work targeting the Intel Xeon Phi and you hesitated because of the additional cost of the Intel developer tools you would need then, you should get a system with the “Xeon Phi developers starter kit”. The savings on the Intel tools can completely offset the cost of the base system. It’s a serious bargain!