Tweaking Tesla
NVIDIA's Tesla GPUs received a massive boost this week as industry heavyweight Microsoft joined ranks with the graphics firm to tweak NV's high-powered cards, making them run better on the Windows HPC Server 2008 operating system.
"The coupling of GPUs and CPUs illustrates the enormous power and opportunity of multicore co-processing," gushed the corporate VP of Microsoft's extreme computing unit, Dan Reed, in a written statement. Indeed, both firms have expressed their enthusiasm about helping to push the boundaries of academic research and development on the GPU, probably not oblivious to the oodles of cash to be made in that particular niche.
Earth-shattering for seismologists
"The scientific community was one of the first to realize the potential of the GPU to transform its work," said the general manager of NVIDIA's Tesla business, Andy Keane, adding that researchers had found speed-ups of between 20x and 200x on compute-intensive applications such like seismic modeling, for instance.
Likewise, an NVIDIA spokesperson told HEXUS that Windows HPC Server was also gaining traction and popularity in academia, "fuelled in part by the increasing number of students who first learn programming on the Windows platform and in the Visual Studio development environment." She went on to explain that NVIDIA was also seeing "a rapid adoption growth of the Tesla computing products in the enterprise space as well as in research and science."
Indeed, NVIDIA is hoping to appeal to academics and businesses of all persuasions, from those interested in hum-drum data-mining to those more into their molecular dynamics and geophysical processing.
Of course, the co-operation is not a question of making Tesla work with Windows. Tesla GPUs are already supported by Windows XP and Vista on the desktop, as well as on the server with Windows Server 2003 and 2008. Even better, upcoming Windows 7 is built to automatically enable any GPUs using Microsoft's DirectCompute API.
