Nvidia and Microsoft have teamed up to promote Nvidia Telsa graphics processing units (GPUs) for high performance parallel computing using the Windows HPC Server 2008 operating system.
Dan Reed, corporate vice president of Extreme Computing at Microsoft, said: “The coupling of GPUs and CPUs illustrates the enormous power and opportunity of multicore co-processing. Nvidia’s work with Microsoft and the Windows HPC Server platform, is helping enable scientists and researchers in many fields achieve supercomputer performance on diverse applications.”
Nvidia said that a whole range of enterprise applications such as data mining, machine learning and business intelligence, as well as scientific applications like molecular dynamics, financial computing and seismic processing are taking advantage of parallel CUDA architecture on which its GPUs are based to achieve higher levels of productivity.
The CUDA architecture enables developers to use the CPU and the GPU together in a co-processing model. Compute-intensive sections of an application use the parallel computing capabilities of the GPU, while the sequential part of an application’s code runs on the CPU, Nvidia added.
Andy Keane, general manager of Tesla business at Nvidia, said: “The scientific community was one of the first to realise the potential of the GPU to transform its work, observing speedups ranging from 20 to 200 times while using a range of compute-intensive applications. Researchers are increasingly using Windows on workstations and in data centres due to strong development tools like Microsoft Visual Studio, its ease of system management and its lower total cost of ownership.”
Reportedly, Nvidia Tesla high-performance GPU computing products support Windows XP and Windows Vista in the workstation and Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 in the data centre.
Content from our partners
