Not all of the developments from NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference (GTC) this year are to do with the company's software technologies. Jen-Hsun Huang also used his keynote to announce three new hardware-partners that would bring Tesla-powered systems to an even wider audience.
The first is a new IBM Blade Center that can be configured with Tesla GPUs. The company is the largest provider of high-performance computers in the world and is responsible for almost 40 per cent of the 500 fastest supercomputers. Of those, around 20 per cent are based on the Blade Center design, making this an important partnership for NVIDIA.
Joining this system is the XE6 from Cray. The company has a long history in the supercomputing market and makes ten out of the 50 fastest supercomputers, including Jaguar - currently the most powerful system on the planet. The XE6 has been specially designed to allow Tesla boards to be installed as a GPU-computing option.
According to Cray's vice president of products, Barry Bolding, "our customers have expressed a growing interest in having accelerator technology in Cray systems, and we believe a Cray XE6 blade with NVIDIA GPUs will provide the performance, scalability, and reliability that a growing segment of our customer base is looking for."
The final hardware partner was T-Platforms, who will be offering NVIDIA GPUs in its TB2 supercomputer. This may not be as big of a name as IBM or Cray, but the company is a major provider of supercomputers in Russia, representing half of the country's high-performance computing TerraFLOPS.
Combined with existing OEMs, NVIDIA GPUs are now available from manufacturers responsible for 84 per cent of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers.
