University of Antwerp Nvidia Supercomputer AMD Powered
University of Antwerp Nvidia Supercomputer AMD Powered PDF Print E-mail
Written by Chris Tom   
Saturday, 31 May 2008 00:13
DV Hardware talks about the University of Antwerp building a supercomputer using 4 9800GX2s. To do it they used a Phenom 9850 and MSI K9A2 Platinum motherboard. It seems no Intel board would handle 4 9800GX2s, and apparently none with a Nvidia chipset either.

Here's a look at the specifications of the FASTRA desktop superPC. The main reason why they configured an AMD system is because they couldn't find a motherboard for the Intel platform that could fit four GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics cards. Another interesting note is that this system doesn't need SLI, their application uses the NVIDIA CUDA programming model which makes all eight GPUs work in parallel. The researchers say they don't need SLI during a reconstruction as every graphics card communicates directly with the CPU, no inter-GPU communication is needed.