FASTRA II: A 13 GPU Super Computer

The FASTRA II is the successor of a custom made super computer that used eight 9800 series GPUs to replace a 512 processor cluster. The FASTRA II brings as much as thirteen GT200 GPUs.

The FASTRA II is built from commodity hardware with some tweaks:

• Lian Li PC80
• P6T7 WS Supercomputer
• Core i7 920
• 12GiB Corsair DDR3 1333 MHz
• Thermaltake Toughpower 1500MHz
• 3 x Thermaltake PowerExpress 450W
• GeForce GTX 275
• 4 x Dual PCB GTX 295
• 2 x Single PCB GTX 295
• 7 x PCI Express risers
• Custom GPU cage.

Impressive hardware indeed, such that the team had to design some of the hardware to support it:

The motherboard and the three extra GPU power supplies that support the graphics cards.

The extensible riser that allows the whole project to work. The ASUS SuperComputer does feature the seven PCI Express slots but doesn't have the space to suport all the GPUs used, since all of them are dual slot models.

The software used can leverage the power of all GPUs due to the little communication between the CPU and the GPUs - the board doesn't add more lanes to the X58 chipset, it just uses switches to provide them. If the software required that all 16 lanes were working per GPU, then the performance would not be as good.

The researchers have achieved slightly more than 4x the performance of the old 512 cluster and 3.6x that of the FASTRA:

The software being used does CAT scan reconstruction to help enhance image quality of the scans and reduce the time needed to do so. It's an area prone to parallel computing and has been one of the first targets for GPU computing for some time.

More information can be found at the FASTRA II blog.