FASTRA II Supercomputer Has 13 GPUs. 13. Count’em!

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By David Ponce

You think you got the biggest, fastest rig in town, don’t ya? Well lemme tell you, it ain’t got squat on the FASTRA II from the Vision Lab of the University of Antwerp. That’s because this baby packs a whopping 13GPUs, from “six NVIDIA GTX295 dual-GPU cards, and one GTX275 single-GPU card, resulting in a massive 12TFLOPS of computing power.” Since the fine people at the University are using the machine for projects that are quite a bit more noble than gaming (think “3D imaging of bone tissue in mice, which is commonly required in medicine research for osteoporosis “), a massive CPU cluster is not required. So there’s a single Core i7 chip along with

an ASUS P6T7 WS mainboard to accommodate all seven video cards; one 1,500W power supply and three 450W supplies keep the extreme power demands in check. A 1TB Samsung hard drive, 12GB of DDR3 memory, and [a] Lian-Li case. The only modifications are a custom cage to suspend the GeForce boards and a custom kernel for the CentOS Linux build that runs the design.

Building one yourself would set you back 6,000 euros.

For a fascinating video tour of the machine, keep reading.

[ FASTRA II ] VIA [ UberGizmo ]

5 COMMENTS

  1. Seeing videos like this, make me so happy. I just get so excited to a smarter future. Now if only we can make sure smart people make children and we put dumber people on birth control.

  2. Seeing videos like this, make me so happy. I just get so excited to a smarter future. Now if only we can make sure smart people make children and we put dumber people on birth control.

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