Barcelona Supercomputing Center to Deploy ARM-based CPU/GPU Hybrid Computer

By DE Editors

NVIDIA has announced that the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) is developing a new hybrid supercomputer that, for the first time, uses energy-efficient, low-power NVIDIA Tegra ARM CPUs, together with NVIDIA CUDA GPUs. BSC is planning to develop the first large-scale system based on this technology, with a near term goal of demonstrating two to five times improvement in energy efficiency compared with today’s most efficient systems.

BSC’s ultimate research goal is to deliver exascale-level performance while using 15 to 30 times less power than current supercomputer architectures. This so-called EU Mont-Blanc Project will explore HPC architectures and develop a portfolio of exascale applications that run efficiently on these kinds of energy-efficient, embedded mobile technologies.

To support growing demand for similar ARM-based initiatives around the world, NVIDIA also announced plans to develop a new hardware and software development kit. The kit, with hardware developed by SECO, will feature a quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 3 ARM CPU accelerated by a discrete NVIDIA GPU. It is expected to be available in the first half of 2012, and will be supported by the NVIDIA CUDA parallel programming toolkit.

In recognition of its work leveraging NVIDIA GPUs and CUDA technology to drive education and research programs across a range of scientific disciplines, BSC was named a CUDA Center of Excellence by NVIDIA.

For more supercomputing news from SC11, visit Engineering on the Edge.

For more information, visit NVIDIA.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.