Acer and Taiwan’s National Center for High-performance Computing are demonstrating that real-time, interactive HPC applications are feasible within a single server node. Using the Acer AT350 F2 server equipped with NVIDIA® Tesla® and Quadro® GPUs and the latest Intel Xeon processors E5 family, NCHC has improved its own computational fluid dynamics (CFD) application capable of simulating air flow across any object in real time. Combining augmented reality with high-performance computing, this application has many practical applications for the design fields.
Speaking on behalf of NCHC, Dr. Matthew Smith explains, “The advantage of augmented reality in the HPC space is its ability to interact in real time with a running HPC job. In the past, the job runs from beginning to end, and has to be modified before or after – not during the job. This system allows engineers to see what is happening immediately to speed up the design processes.”
The Acer AT350 F2 server, used as the base of the model, was a perfect solution to demonstrate recent advances in computing technology. With room for two CPUs, 24 DDR3 DIMMs, and support for two high-end NVIDIA Tesla C2075 GPUs and/or NVIDIA Quadro series GPUs, this server delivers a ‘supercomputer in a box’.
Duncan Liu, HPC project director of Acer’s Enterprise Products Business Unit, expressed, “Acer is always looking to empower users with the best technology packaged in a usable manner. This application represents the very best of what we hope to achieve by enabling users to run high-performance computing within a single unit, saving cost and power.”
“Research and development groups no longer need to rely exclusively on a large supercomputing cluster to test various design parameters and scenarios,” said Sumit Gupta, senior director of the Tesla business at NVIDIA. “Acer and NCHC are demonstrating that GPUs make supercomputing-class performance more accessible than ever in affordable, small-form factor systems that deliver significant energy savings.”
For more information and a live demo, please visit the Acer booth #320 at the 2012 International Supercomputing Conference (ISC’12) in Germany.
