The First Wave of Tesla 20-Series Based Server Products

By Andrew Humber on May 4 2010
In Software, Supercomputing
No Comments

Next month, the Tesla business at NVIDIA will celebrate its 3rd birthday (no gifts necessary, really). Three years ago, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was the only university teaching its students how to use CUDA and program GPUs. Today, more than 340 schools have included CUDA into their curriculum.

I live and breathe this stuff, but the impact that GPUs are having in the high performance computing space continues to inspire me. Few days pass without hearing about another application that’s getting a huge speed up courtesy of the GPU. More often than not it’s in an industry that has a huge impact on many people’s lives. Think cancer research, aircraft design, video surveillance, weather prediction, drug discovery – all have been touched and transformed by GPUs.

Today we saw the first of a series of launches from our partners of new products based on our new Tesla M2050 GPU Computing modules. What’s particularly exciting about these launches is that they are all server products, an important area of the Tesla business and one that’s about to take off exponentially. For the last 3 years we have seen a lot of pilot projects – in banks, in the military, in science – projects that enabled scientists and researchers to experiment with GPUs and see how they can be used to increase the pace and scope of their work.

Appro Greenblade

We know that these pilot programs have been successful – -their stories are on CUDA Zone – and their project owners let us know how much they’re looking forward to taking advantage of the new Tesla 20-series GPUs, based on “Fermi” architecture. Now that they can call up partners such as Appro, Supermicro, Tyan and order systems based on the Tesla M2050, or call Bright Computing to find out about its cluster management software with new GPU management and monitoring capabilities, we should start to see people taking their work to an exciting new level.

Tyan

Stay tuned for more announcements from some of our key channel partners and industry leading OEMs. I think by the time we hit four candles on Tesla’s birthday cake, you’ll see significant transformations across a range of industries and research fields leveraging Tesla GPUs.

Supermicro 1U