Spaniards prototype ARM-GPU hybrid supercomputer

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain has been an enthusiastic supporter of using IBM's Power970MP blade servers as a foundation for its "MareNostrum" massively parallel Linux cluster, which fills 44 server racks and delivers 94.1 teraflops of number-crunching punch. A few years back, this was a pretty big box, but these …

[Anonymous Coward]

10Mw ? Didn't the spanish just build a massive solar ranch in Arizona? That was 20Mw I believe. Out of general green interest, how many flops does one get when one does some thing like seti with the public's computers ? Could a SC feed in tariff be more viable than a green electric tariff ?

[Gordan]

The number's almost add up

But they are not quite spot on. Tegra2 is a dual-core Cortex A9 chip. It is capable of addressing up to 1GB of RAM. Tegra3 is actually a 5-core CPU based on a 1+4 custom design.

If they are claiming 1TB of main RAM in total, that means 1024 Tegra2 CPUs which is 2048 cores. Assuming 1 GPU per CPU that would mean 1024 GPUs.

The 1024 cores / 256 GPUs / 1TB of RAM combination doesn't quite add up with either Tegra chip.

[Anonymous Coward]

My name is...

Inigo Montoya

You unplugged my server.

Prepare to die.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm...

I would have upvoted you for a Captain Alatriste reference

[Michael Duke]

No they are claiming 1TB from the Tegra3 / GPU based rack @ 4GB per Tegra3.

Even that is high though considering the nVidia site says that the Tegra3 only supports 2GB of memory per chip, unless there is a "HPC Version" of Tegra3 that supports more memory.

[PsYcHoTiC_MaDmAn]

256 ARM cores with 2GB each = 512 GB http://www.nvidia.com/object/tegra-superchip.html

256 GPUs with 2GB each =512 GB http://wccftech.com/nvidia-announces-geforce-gtx560m-gt520mx-mobility-solutions/

theres the 1TB

not sure if thats the explanation, but it seems a reasonable guess