IBM Eureka Has NVIDIA GPUs At Its Core

How’s this for one big high-performance supercomputer: The IBM Blue Gene/P Intrepid at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), located at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, will soon earn the distinct honor not only as being the fastest computer in the world for open science, but also to be among the few to boost heavy-duty data analytics and visualization capabilities.

Argonne just awarded GraphStream Inc. a contract to make data analytics and visualization at this scale possible via the world’s largest installation of NVIDIA Quadro Plex S4 external GPUs. This new supercomputer installation, nicknamed Eureka and comprised of 104 dual quad core servers equipped with 208 Quadro FX5600 GPUs in the S4s, will allow researchers to explore and visualize the data they produce with Intrepid.

In just over a minute, Intrepid can produce the equivalent of 1,000 DVDs of data; the additional analytics and visualization capabilities will help scientists plow through this massive pool of data faster than before allowing them to uncover new insights, according to officials.
 
GraphStream, a supplier of scalable computer systems, will use the NVIDIA Quadro Plex (S4) visual computing system as the base graphics building block. Four high-end graphics cards will be placed in 1U “pizza box,” and this cost-effective configuration handles all the power and cooling issues associated with the graphics cards.