Nvidia deploys Tesla GPUs at Russian varsity

MUMBAI, INDIA: As Russian scientists increasingly deploy GPU-enabled supercomputers to tackle scientific challenges.

Moscow State University is upgrading its Lomonosovsystem with Nvidia Tesla GPUs to be one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, said a press release.

The upgraded system couples 1,554Nvidia Tesla X2070 GPUs with an identical number of quad-core CPUs, delivering an expected 1.3 petaflops of peak performance, placing at number 1 in Russia and amongst the fastest systems in the world.

The system is used for research focused on computationally intensive areas such as global climate change, ocean modeling, post-genomic medicine and, galaxy formation, the release added.

“Our research requires enormous computational resources, and we need to deliver this performance as efficiently as possible,” said Victor Sadovnichy, academician, Rector of Moscow State University.

He added that the only way for them to achieve these twin goals is with a hybrid GPU/CPU based system.

Supercomputing centers all over the world are looking at ways to increase performance without exceeding power budgets. GPUs deliver high performance per watt, anadvantage that is being leveraged across many research centers in Russia including the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics;Lobachevsky State University of Nizhni Novgorod (NNSU); and the Scientific and Educational Center of Parallel Computing at Perm State University.

“There is a staggering potential for GPU/CPU-based systems hybrid solutions to help us address a great number of scientific challenges such as studying living systems, bio-photonics and computational mathematics,” said Victor Gergel, Dean of the computational mathematics and cybernetics department at NNSU, director of Scientific and Research Institute of Applied Mathematics and Cybernetics.

He added that in cooperation with Nvidia,NNSU is able to give more of their students and researchers access to computational resources that will significantly increase the pace of their work.