So most folks understand that they have a special chip or card in their gadgets which runs the graphics on their computers, phones, game consoles, etc. A Graphics Processing Unit is really good at crunching numbers to provide us things like detailed environments, high resolution textures, dynamic lighting, and fluid particle effects. A GPU is purpose built to chew through information our CPU’s aren’t great at dealing with.

Over the last couple years, that number crunching ability is now being harnessed for other computing tasks. As an example, my video editing software uses my GPU to render video, so my aged workstation is still pretty quick at pushing high quality HD video out the door. The fact that I have an old CPU, doesn’t hamstring me that much.

Well, moving up the computing ladder, many number crunching super computers are incorporating GPUs. Piz Daint in Switzerland, activated earlier this year, utilizes NVIDIA K20X GPU’s. It was built for life science, physics, and meteorological simulations. The system is not only the fastest supercomputer in Europe, but it’s also up to 7 times more energy efficient than traditional computing solutions.  Continue reading “NVIDIA partners with IBM for GPU accelerated Super Computing, Unveils Tesla K40 GPU”