"Nvidia has begun close collaboration with HPC makers including NEC, Cray, Bull and Hewlett-Packard (HP) to integrate Nvidia Tesla GPUs into systems for the high performance computing (HPC) industry, based on its personal supercomputing strategy.

Nvidia argues that its GPU solutions are attractive to HPC developers because heterogeneous computing, where GPUs work in tandem with CPUs, is making breakthroughs in desktop supercomputing possible. Currently, scientific research is carried out on supercomputing clusters, a shared resource that consumes large amounts of power and costs millions of dollars to build and maintain, and researchers must fight for time on these resources, slowing their work and delaying results, Nvidia claims.

GPU-based Tesla personal supercomputers, on the other hand, can deliver the equivalent computing power of a cluster, at 1/100th of the price and in a form factor of a standard desktop workstation, Nvidia stated.

Nvidia Tesla GPU computing processors are being used in industries such as oil and gas, finance, medical and life science, claims Nvidia. In many cases, processing tasks that are simply not possible on CPU-based clusters and workstations are being enabled by the Tesla 10-series products, the chip maker added. Each Tesla processor has 240 cores, providing one teraflop of processing power, along with 4GB of onboard memory. The new Tesla S1070 1U system features four Tesla 10-series processors – for a total of 960 cores and four teraflops of processing power.

Nvidia recently made a breakthrough in its HPC development when the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) announced that the addition of 170 Tesla S1070 1U systems to its Tsubame supercomputer helped deliver a combined nearly 170 TFLOPS of theoretical peak performance, as well as 77.48 TFLOPS of measured Linpack performance, placing the system among the top ranks in the world's Top 500 Supercomputers.

GPU-based Tesla personal supercomputers are also available from numerous HPC vendors including Dell, Asustek Computer and Lenovo."