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Eight card carrying

Standing out from the crowd at last week's GTC event, a firm by the name of Colfax International managed to wow attendees with its CXT8000; a server with eight NVIDIA Tesla GPUs and purportedly the world's first such system.

The eight GPU (eight Tflop), 4U, rack-mounted supercomputer was rendered even more impressive by its specially engineered motherboard - sporting no less than eight PCIe Gen 2 x16 slots.

Backing up the eight GPUs with their whopping 1,920 processor cores (8 x 240), the system also sports two Intel Xeon (Nehalem) DP quad-core W5590 processors, up to 144GB of DDR3 system memory, two internal 2.5in SATA drives, two 1,200W (2,400W) non-redundant power supplies, four Intel 82574l Gigabit Ethernet controllers, IPMI 2.0W/IKVM support, integrated ASPEED AST 2050 VGA controller and a Linux OS.

The basic configuration would set buyers back by around $21,140, but Colfax says it will allow punters to configure their boxes with alternative options on its website, updating the price of the system accordingly, of course.

Colfax, a Sunnyvale, California-based firm which has been building hardware for over 22 years, says the PCIe slots can equally be used for Quadro FX or Infiniband cards in place of the C1060 cards, which don't have a video head on them.

Colfax's VP of sales, Mike Fay, gushed about his company's system, and its potential for industries like oil and gas or the financial sector. "Our announcement of the Colfax CXT8000 GPU server is in a class by itself, doubling the current Tflops and GPU density limitations known to most users today," he told HEXUS, concluding "eight Tflops is happening now and for real".

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