NVIDIA Powers Russian Supercomputers, German Lunar Landing Project

By DE Editors

The two most powerful supercomputers in Russia will use NVIDIA GPUs to address some of the worlds most challenging scientific problems across a broad range of fields. The two supercomputers are housed at Lomonosov Moscow State Unviersity and the Joint Supercomputer Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences (JSCC RAS).

The challenges of modern science can only be addressed by applying huge computational resources, said Vladimir Voevodin, coordinator of the Supercomputing Consortium of Russian Universities and deputy director of the MSU Research Computing Center.  NVIDIA GPU technologies are one of the most efficient and cost-effective ways to address these challenges.
 
Russian scientists are using NVIDIA Tesla GPUs to accelerate scientific research and discovery for a range of important research projects today, and plan to increase the number GPU-accelerated projects in the future.  For example, researchers at IMM UB RAS plan to harness their computational power to accelerate algorithms designed to navigate the Soyuz-2-class carrier rocket, determining an optimal orbit trajectory and ensuring a safe arrival at the target orbit.
 
In addition, NVIDIA Tesla GPUs are being used by a team of German scientists participating in a global competition to land a robotic rover on the moon by 2015. The Google Lunar X Prize will award $30 million to the first privately funded teams that safely land a rover on the surface of the moon, drive the rover 500 meters over the lunar surface, and transmit detailed video, images and data back to Earth for further study.
 
A team of 100 German scientists, engineers and developers has formed the Part-Time Scientists team to participate in the contest. The PTS team has deployed NVIDIA Tesla GPUs in several of the servers and workstations in its mission-control center where the Asimov rover will be operated.  Tesla GPUs will accelerate the missions computationally intensive applications, such as simulating vehicle navigation, monitoring positions of the rover in real time, and processing and transmitting high-resolution video and images.

For more information, visit NVIDIA.

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