NVIDIA To Power World's First ARM-Based Hybrid Supercomputer

The folks at NVIDIA have today announced that they'll be part of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center's next new hybrid supercomputer, complete with NVIDIA Tegra ARM CPUs and high-performance NVIDIA CUDA GPUs galore. Today's most efficient systems will be outdone in the energy efficiency department by the first large scale systems based on this technology, the first examples being shown off this week in Seattle Washington as the SC11 Conference (at book #235, if you'd like to know.) Fifteen to thirty times less power consumption than current supercomputer architectures on a exascale-level performance machine? Yes please.

This project is known as the EU Mont-Blanc Project and will otherwise take part in developing a portfolio of exascale applications that work well on the technology now being developed with NVIDIA. Sound familiar? The leader of this Mont-Blanc project mister Alex Remirez, notes that while current systems need to give the "lion's share" of energy to the CPUs, 40 percent or more, that is, "the Mont-Blanc architecture will rely on energy-efficient compute accelerators and ARM processors used in embedded and mobile devices to achieve a four- to 10-times increase in energy-efficiency by 2014." Exciting!

NVIDIA expanded upon what it'd do to work with developers by noting that they'd be releasing a new hardware and software development kit for its ARM-based initiatives around the globe. This kit will of course contain a brand new quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 3 ARM CPU complete with a "discrete" NVIDIA GPU, all of this available inside the first half of 2012. This kit's hardware is being developed by SECO and will be supported by the NVIDIA CUDA parallel programming toolkit. Get in on the action!