G.E.N.C.I.: 1068 CPUs & 96 GPUs? Posted on 21/04/2008 at 22:58 by Nicolas
The Grand Équipement National de Calcul Intensif (Genci), a 50% state owned company (the 50% is shared between the CEA, CNRS and universities) and created last year by the French ministry of education plans on using its resources in an optimal way.
Thus, they have just ordered from Bull a latest generation Novascale, a supercalculator which has 1068 octo core CPUs and at least 48 or up to 96 GPUs. At first, this configuration may appear odd; however, we should keep in mind that a simple GeForce 8400GS can in some cases rival an Intel V8 platform which is based on 2 Xeon X5365 (quad core & 3 GHz). Obviously, this is only true for some types of calculations...
The exact type of GPU that will be used was not specified but it should be Nvidia’s next flagship model. There are even rumors that calculation precision on floating points will be 64 bits but nothing is too sure. Total power should be roughly 300 Tflops, 192 of which thanks to the GPUs alone.
The Grand Équipement National de Calcul Intensif (Genci), a 50% state owned company (the 50% is shared between the CEA, CNRS and universities) and created last year by the French ministry of education plans on using its resources in an optimal way.