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KQED Warns Of Supercomputing â€˜Energy Wallâ€™ â€“ NVIDIA Helps Scale It With GPUs

PC News Zone — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 09:00:47 +0000

Lauren Sommer wrote a great blog over the weekend on KQED about how supercomputers have hit the “energy wall” – a decidedly real supercomputing problem that NVIDIA’s GPU technology can help to overcome. This is what 1,000 homes looks like. The blog post mentions the Hopper supercomputer, located at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL). The system consumes 3 megawatts of electricity (enough to power 2,000-3,000 homes a year) and has performance of 1 petaflop per second (equivalent to about 68,000 laptops). It’s hard to imagine these numbers scaling to exascale systems – the “energy wall” here would just be too high to reasonably surmount. In fact, I just got back from the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, where the running joke was that power companies would soon be giving supercomputers away for free if you sign up for a five-year power contract with them. Here at NVIDIA, we’ve been working on a solution to the supercomputing power crisis for several years. Supercomputers can use NVIDIA Tesla GPUs to dramatically accelerate supercomputing applications. Like a turbocharger on your car, GPUs kick in to boost your standard Intel or AMD CPUs when you need the extra oomph. Using GPUs is a much more energy efficient way of supercomputing. You choose the right processor to the do the right job. When I edit pictures of my kids, for example, my computer’s sequential Intel or AMD x86 CPU is used to access the hard disk, retrieve the file, and open it. Once the picture is open, and I want to do red-eye reduction or remove the blur, the GPU kicks into gear to accelerate the job. Three of the Top Five supercomputers in the world are accelerated by NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. One of these is the Tsubame 2.0 system at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Like the Hopper system at LBNL, it delivers 1 petaflop per second of performance. But thanks to its GPUs, it consumes less than half the power of the Hopper system. To be exact, Tsubame achieves 1.19 Petaflop/sec and sips a “mere” 1.4 megawatts of electricity. Half the power for the same performance is a big leap forward. But we have a long road ahead, especially as we move towards exascale supercomputers that will be 1,000 times more powerful than the current petaflop supers. Otherwise, the power companies will indeed start giving away supercomputers away for free!

NVIDIA announces GeForce GTX 580M and 570M, availability in the Alienware M18x and MSI GT780R

PC News Zone — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 11:46:16 +0000

We know you're going to be shocked -- shocked! -- to hear this, but NVIDIA's gone and refreshed its high-end line of GeForce GTX cards. The GTX 580M takes the place of the GTX 485M, and NVIDIA's bragging that it's the "fastest notebook GPU ever," capable, we're told, of besting the Radeon HD 6970M's tesselation performance by a factor of six. The new GTX 570M, meanwhile, promises a 20 percent speed boost over the last-generation 470M. Both 40-nanometer cards support DirectX11, OpenCL, PhysX, CUDA, 3D Vision, Verde drivers, Optimus, SLI, and 3DTV Play. As for battery life, NVIDIA's saying that when coupled with its Optimus graphics switching technology, the 580M can last through five hours of Facebook, but last we checked, that's not why y'all are shelling out thousands for beastly gaming rigs. You can find the 580M in the Alienware M17X and M18X (pictured) starting today, though you might have to wait a week or so for them to ship. Meanwhile, the 570M is shipping in the MSI GT780R as you read this, and you'll also find the 580M in a pair of 3D-capable Clevo laptops: the P170HM3 and the SLI-equipped P270WN. Handy chart full 'o technical details after the break.

	GeForce GTX 570M	GeForce GTX 580M

Processor cores	Up to 336	Up to 384
Support for	PhysX, Verde drivers, CUDA, 3D Vision, 3DTV Play, Optimus, SLI, DirectX11	PhysX, Verde drivers, CUDA, 3D Vision, 3DTV Play, Optimus, SLI, DirectX11
Processor clock speed	Up to 1150MHz	Up to 1240MHz
Memory clock speed	Up to 1500MHz	Up to 1500MHz
Memory	Up to 1.5GB or 3GB	Up to 2GB GDDR5
Memory width	Up to 192-bit	Up to 256-bit
Memory type	GDDR5	GDDR5

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Fastest. Notebook GPU. Ever.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580M GPU Launches in Alienware M18x and M17x Notebooks with Record-Breaking Gaming Performance

SANTA CLARA, Calif.-June 28, 2011- NVIDIA today announced the world's fastest notebook graphics processing unit (GPU), the NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 580M. Available now in the Alienware M18x, the new GPU sets new standards in industry leading benchmarks and games. It will also be available soon in the Alienware M17x notebook along with NVIDIA Optimus™ technology.

"The best game support. The best gaming features. The best gaming performance available anywhere. That's the essence of the GeForce GTX 580M," said Rene Haas general manager of notebook products at NVIDIA. "With power like this, you can turn all the knobs to 11."

The first notebook PC to feature the GeForce GTX 580M, the Alienware M18x offers the option of two GeForce GTX 580M GPUs in one system for up to double the gaming performance, using NVIDIA SLI® technology. Not to be outdone, the Alienware M17x will offer the GeForce GTX 580M along with NVIDIA Optimus™ technology and will deliver 5 hours of battery life in Facebook, and 100 frames per second performance in Call of Duty: Black Ops.

"Gamers aspire to experience games at their highest settings," says Eddy Goyanes, product marketing manager for Alienware. "Alienware activates the technology designed to enable those aspirations. With the launch of the GeForce GTX 580M on the Alienware M17x, and a dual card option on the M18x, that synergy continues - Alienware delivers the ultimate gaming experience."

GeForce GTX 580M GPUs are the fastest Microsoft DirectX 11 notebook GPUs on the market, offering up to six times the tessellation performance of any other notebook GPU. They are also more efficient, with up to 20 percent better performance per watt than the previous generation.

NVIDIA also introduced the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570M GPU, which offers 20 percent faster performance than the previous generation product it replaces.

The power of GeForce GTX GPUs means gamers can play at full 1080p high-definition resolutions with the advanced technology features that set GeForce GPUs apart from the competition. These include:
· Support for NVIDIA 3D Vision™ technology, the #1 3D experience for notebooks, which automatically converts over 525 titles into immersive 3D.
· Support for NVIDIA 3DTV Play™ software, for connecting 3D Vision-based notebooks to 3D TVs.
· NVIDIA SLI® technology, which links two GTX GPU's for up to double your gaming performance.
· NVIDIA Optimus technology, which enables extra-long battery life by automatically switching on and off the GPU so that it runs only when needed.
· NVIDIA PhysX® engine support, which brings games to life with realistic physics.
· NVIDIA CUDA® architecture support, for GPU computing applications.
· NVIDIA Verde™ notebook drivers, for frequent performance improvements and rock-solid stability.

For more information on any GeForce 500M Series GPUs, visit www.nvidia.com.

NVIDIA Launches PhysX 3.0 With Support For Emerging Gaming Platforms

pcnz_admin — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 17:41:58 +0000

I am very pleased to announce the launch of a brand new version of the very popular NVIDIA PhysX SDK. The new PhysX 3.0 SDK is available to all registered developers on our developer support website located at:Â http://supportcenteronline.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=1949

PhysX is the worldâ€™s most pervasive physics solution for highly realistic and real-time simulation based effects for games, film and more. Version 3.0 of PhysX has been over three years in the making and features a new modular architecture and a completely rewritten PhysX engine. It provides a significant boost in overall performance, as well as efficient, reliable simulations across a broad spectrum of multi-core gaming devices â€“ such as PCs, notebooks and gaming consoles, as well as emerging gaming platforms like handheld game devices, tablets, and smartphones.

Letâ€™s take a look at some of the key features and capabilities of PhysX 3.0 SDK:

Larger Levels: Game levels are getting larger these days. That means they require more actors. In PhysX 3.0, developers can combine multiple actors into a single â€œaggregateâ€, which is managed as a single bounding-box entity in the broadphase stage of the collision pipeline. This reduces the computing load required to predict collisions between actors, and helps improve overall performance and memory efficiency of PhysX-3 relative to earlier versions.

Streaming: PhysX 3.0 enables efficient streaming of asset data into a simulation through a new feature,binary in-place serialization, which allows quick and memory-efficient insertion of actors into a scene. In addition, out-of-scene actor creation, which allows actors to be created outside the scene and stored rather than being created and destroyed on demand, provides developers with better asset management while minimizingÂ troublesome compute load spikes.

More Effective Multithreading: The new Task Manager with managed thread pool allows games to take advantage of multi-core processors on all platforms, resulting in greatly increased performance and a much improved gaming experience.

Flexible and Powerful Tools: In addition to a highly optimized physics runtime, NVIDIA isÂ releasing improved tools for artists that have been tailored to work within the developerâ€™s asset production pipeline.Â A new release of PhysX Visual Debugger allows superior performance profiling, detailed memory analysis and improved visualization of all PhysX content across all major platforms.

PhysX 3.0 is available for all major gaming platforms, including PC, Xbox360â„¢, PLAYSTATIONÂ®3, OSX, Linux and Android. PhysX 3.0 is designed to run on a variety of CPU architectures. Performance can be accelerated by any CUDAâ„¢-enabled NVIDIA GPU â€“ including any GeForce 8-series or higher graphics card.

Like its predecessor, PhysX 2.8, the new PhysX 3.0 SDK binary version is available without charge to all registered and platform-authorized developers for both commercial and non-commercial applications.

For more information on NVIDIA PhysX and APEX technologies, please visit: www.nvidia.com/physx.