GPUs on the grid

image from CL Lab" www.cse.buffalo.edu

Russ Miller, principal investigator at CI Lab, stands in front of the server rack that holds Magic, a synchronous supercomputer that can achieve up to 50 Teraflops.

Enhancing the performance of computer clusters and supercomputers using graphical processing units is all the rage. But what happens when you put these chips on a full-fledged grid?

Meet “Magic,” a supercomputing cluster based at the University of Buffalo’s CyberInfrastructure Laboratory (CI Lab). On the surface, Magic is like any other cluster of Dell nodes. “But then attached to each Dell node is an nVidia node, and each of these nVidia nodes have roughly 1000 graphical processing units,” said Russ Miller, the principal investigator for CI Lab. “Those GPUs are the same as the graphical processing unit in many laptops and desktops.”

That’s the charm of these chips: because they are mass-manufactured for use in your average, run-of-the-mill computer, they are an extremely inexpensive way of boosting computational power. That boost comes at a price, however.

“These roughly 1000 processors on each nVidia node are programmed in a synchronous process, basically bringing us back to programming methods of the 1960s,” said Miller.

Magic has been hooked up to Open Science Grid and the New York State Grid since February.

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