NVIDIA Tesla personal supercomputer

How would you like to have your own supercomputer for less than 10,000 dollars? It is your dream, you say? Well, if so then NVIDIA has just made your dreams come true having announced the Tesla personal supercomputer.

The Tesla is a desktop computer designed for those in need of a number crunching machine. It comes with an AMD Quad-core Phenom or Opteron or Intel Core2 Duo microprocessor and 3 or 4 Tesla C1060 multi-core add-on cards. The C1060 have 240 parallel processing cores and up to 4GB of memory each which means that the desktop configuration that comes with 4 of them packs a total of 960 cores and 16GB of dedicated memory. NVIDIA claims that this configuration provides customers with supercomputer performance under the desk. The official numbers are that the machine with 4 C1060 boards can do 3.732 Teraflops or roughly perform 250 times faster than your average desktop workstation.

The Tesla is programmable using the company's CUDA programming architecture which basically means that you can program it in C. This is no machine for playing games but for serious scientific computing; I know, scientists get to have all the fun, don't they? Imagine how much cheaper this technology is going to be in a few years. Personally, I can't wait to own one of these for a couple of thousand dollars. In the meantime, I may have to beg my employer to buy me one. :)

Check out the following video announcing the Tesla personal supercomputer at SC08.