GPU cluster project

For more information about ISL's GPU cluster, contact:

Mike Showerman
mshow@ncsa.uiuc.edu
217-244-5478

NCSA's Innovative Systems Laboratory maintains a 16-node cluster that combines both GPU (graphics processing units) and FPGA (field-programmable gate array) technology in order to explore the potential of these novel architectures to accelerate scientific computing.

The 16 compute nodes feature:

• Two dual-core 2.4 GHz AMD Opterons, 8 GB of memory
• Four NVIDIA Quadro 5600 GPUs, each with 1.5 GB of memory
• Nallatech H101-PCIX FPGA accelerator, 16 MB SRAM, 512 MB SDRAM

The FPGA accelerators were donated by Xilinx. NVIDIA donated the GPUs to the research team led by Wen-mei Hwu, the Sanders-AMD Endowed Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Hwu is also a principal investigator on the Blue Waters project to build the world’s first sustained-petascale computing system for open scientific research and the leader of a research theme on the simulation of natural and engineered systems in the University's Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies.

Since the cluster was installed in 2007, it has been in heavy use as NCSA staff and researchers from the University of Illinois and other institutions have explored the potential these technologies have to accelerate a wide range of science and engineering applications, from molecular dynamics to weather modeling.

Later in 2008, the center plans to upgrade the cluster to 32 nodes and 128 GPUs.

Additional details on QP are available in this conference paper.