Convey Computer
Texas Advanced Computing Center
HPCwire

Since 1986 - Covering the Fastest Computers
in the World and the People Who Run Them

Language Flags

Visit additional Tabor Communication Publications

Datanami
Digital Manufacturing Report
HPC in the Cloud
Green Computing Report

Tabor Communications
Corporate Video

GPUs Spur Discovery of New Pulsar


Details of discovery revealed as Einstein@Home project releases new CUDA GPU-optimized version delivering 20X boost in performance

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Mar. 1 -- A computing enthusiast in the U.K., equipped with an NVIDIA CUDA-enabled GPU, has been involved in the discovery of a new pulsar, as part of the worldwide "volunteer distributed-computing" project known as Einstein@Home.

The pulsar, originally discovered in July 2010, is identified as PSR J1952+2630. It measures about 15 kilometers in diameter and is located more than 30,000 light years from Earth, where it orbits a companion star that weighs about the same as the Sun. It is hoped that this discovery will enable scientists to learn more about the process of stellar evolution and how matter behaves at very high densities.

The Einstein@Home project uses spare computing power donated by hundreds of thousands of PC users all over the world to search data from gravitational wave detectors and radio telescopes. The newly released version of its software leverages NVIDIA CUDA-enabled GPUs to get a 20X boost in performance -- as a result, just 10 percent of the GPUs that connect to the project daily could deliver the equivalent processing power of all the contributing CPUs.

More than two million machines have been signed up to participate in Einstein@Home since its launch in 2005, and some 100,000 systems contact the servers each week. If the computational power generated by the project were counted as a single system, it would be ranked among the 20 fastest supercomputers in the world.

The creation of project director, Prof. Bruce Allen, who is also director of the Max Planck Institute of Gravitational Physics, in Hannover, Germany, Einstein@Home is considered by many to be one of the most important, and most efficient, scientific experiments in the world.

"The growing importance of GPUs in Einstein@Home has radio astronomers enormously excited. They are enabling us to analyze, in one month, data that would have taken conventional processors a year to work through," said Allen. "It's a dramatic change and eventually I could imagine that GPUs will contribute around 90 percent of the project's computational science with CPUs contributing the remainder."

A paper titled: "Arecibo PALFA Survey and Einstein@Home: Binary Pulsar Discovery By Volunteer Computing" was released last night and can be found here. For more general information on the Einstein@Home project, please go here and for more information regarding general purpose computing on NVIDIA GPUs, please go here.

About NVIDIA

NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) awakened the world to the power of computer graphics when it invented the GPU in 1999. Since then, it has consistently set new standards in visual computing with breathtaking, interactive graphics available on devices ranging from tablets and portable media players to notebooks and workstations. NVIDIA's expertise in programmable GPUs has led to breakthroughs in parallel processing which make supercomputing inexpensive and widely accessible. The Company holds more than 1,700 patents worldwide, including ones covering designs and insights that are essential to modern computing. For more information, see www.nvidia.com.

-----

Source: NVIDIA

Sponsored Links

High-Performance Computing in Action
Businesses that want to be on the cutting edge of their industries are increasingly turning to high-performance computing (HPC) solutions to handle complex compute processes and speed up their rate of innovation. Download this Executive Brief to see how businesses in energy, life sciences and entertainment put HPC solutions to work in their operations.

Accelerate your science with Seneca
One of the first HPC providers installing a 4X NVIDIA Kepler K-20 cluster. Invites you to a free evaluation on Seneca’s NVIDIA K20 Kepler cluster, pre-loaded with AMBER, NAMD, LAMMPS

May 17, 2013

May 16, 2013

May 15, 2013

May 14, 2013

May 13, 2013

May 10, 2013

May 09, 2013

May 08, 2013

May 07, 2013

May 06, 2013


Cray CS300-LC

Feature Articles

Saddling Phi for TACC’s Stampede

The Xeon Phi coprocessor might be the new kid on the high performance block, but out of all first-rate kickers of the Intel tires, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) got the first real jab with its new top ten Stampede system.We talk with the center's Karl Schultz about the challenges of programming for Phi--but more specifically, the optimization...
Read more...

"No Exascale for You!" An Interview with Berkeley Lab's Horst Simon

Although Horst Simon was named Deputy Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he maintains his strong ties to the scientific computing community as an editor of the TOP500 list and as an invited speaker at conferences.
Read more...

Supercomputing Vet Champions Quantum Cause

Supercomputing veteran, Bo Ewald, has been neck-deep in bleeding edge system development since his twelve-year stint at Cray Research back in the mid-1980s, which was followed by his tenure at large organizations like SGI and startups, including Scale Eight Corporation and Linux Networx. He has put his weight behind quantum company....
Read more...

Short Takes

Running Computational Fluid Dynamics in the Cloud

May 16, 2013 | When it comes to cloud, long distances mean unacceptably high latencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany examined those latency issues of doing CFD modeling in the cloud by utilizing a common CFD and its utilization in HPC instance types including both CPU and GPU cores of Amazon EC2.
Read more...

Computing the Physics of Bubbles

May 15, 2013 | Supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have worked on important computational problems such as collapse of the atomic state, the optimization of chemical catalysts, and now modeling popping bubbles.
Read more...

Internet2 Awards Program Seeks Innovative Applications

May 10, 2013 | Program provides cash awards up to $10,000 for the best open-source end-user applications deployed on 100G network.
Read more...

Floating Funding to Exascale Island

May 09, 2013 | The Japanese government has revealed its plans to best its previous K Computer efforts with what they hope will be the first exascale system...
Read more...

HPC and the True Cost of Cloud

May 08, 2013 | For engineers looking to leverage high-performance computing, the accessibility of a cloud-based approach is a powerful draw, but there are costs that may not be readily apparent.
Read more...

Sponsored Whitepapers

Best Practices in Big Data Storage

05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.

Progress in Parallel: the Bull Parallel Programming Center

04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.

Sponsored Multimedia

SGI DMF ZeroWatt Disk Solution

In this demonstration of SGI DMF ZeroWatt disk solution, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, discusses a function of SGI DMF software to reduce costs and power consumption in an exascale (Big Data) storage datacenter.

Cray CS300-AC Cluster Supercomputer Air Cooling Technology Video

The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.

SC12 Editorial Feature HPCwire Soundbite sponsored by ISC

HPC Job Bank


Featured Events


  • June 16, 2013 - June 20, 2013
    ISC'13
    Leipzig,
    Germany

  • June 17, 2013 - June 18, 2013
    Forecast 2013
    San Francisco, CA
    United States





HPCwire Events