SANTA CLARA, Calif. —Sep. 30, 2009—Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) announced plans today for a new supercomputer that will use NVIDIA®’s next generation CUDA™ GPU architecture, codenamed “Fermi”. Used to pursue research in areas such as energy and climate change, ORNL’s supercomputer is expected to be 10-times more powerful than today’s fastest supercomputer.
Jeff Nichols, ORNL associate lab director for Computing and Computational Sciences, joined NVIDIA co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang on stage during his keynote at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference. He told the audience of 1,400 researchers and developers that “Fermi” would enable substantial scientific breakthroughs that would be impossible without the new technology.
“This would be the first co-processing architecture that Oak Ridge has deployed for open science, and we are extremely excited about the opportunities it creates to solve huge scientific challenges,” Nichols said. “With the help of NVIDIA technology, Oak Ridge proposes to create a computing platform that will deliver exascale computing within ten years.”
ORNL also announced it will be creating the Hybrid Multicore Consortium. The goals of this consortium are to work with the developers of major scientific codes to prepare those applications to run on the next generation of supercomputers built using GPUs.
“The first two generations of the CUDA GPU architecture enabled NVIDIA to make real in-roads into the scientific computing space, delivering dramatic performance increases across a broad spectrum of applications,” said Bill Dally, chief scientist at NVIDIA. “The ‘Fermi’ architecture is a true engine of science and with the support of national research facilities such as ORNL, the possibilities are endless.”
For more information on “Fermi”, NVIDIA’s next generation CUDA compute and graphics architecture, please visit: www.nvidia.com/fermi and for more information on ORNL, please visit www.ornl.gov
About
NVIDIA
NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA) awakened the world to
the power of computer graphics when it invented the graphics processing
unit (GPU) in 1999. Since then, it has consistently set new standards
in visual computing with breathtaking, interactive graphics available
on devices ranging from portable media players to notebooks to
workstations. NVIDIA’s expertise in programmable GPUs has led
to
breakthroughs in parallel processing which make supercomputing
inexpensive and widely accessible. Fortune magazine has ranked NVIDIA
#1 in innovation in the semiconductor industry for two years in a row.
For more information, see www.nvidia.com.
