NVIDIA Partnershp With IBM Could Widen Use of GPU Accelerators

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NVIDIA's new Tesla K40 graphics processing unit. (Photo: NVIDIA Corp.)

In a move that could help expand the market for graphics processing units (GPUs), NVIDIA and IBM will collaborate on GPU-accelerated versions of IBM's wide portfolio of enterprise software applications on IBM Power Systems. The move, announced Monday at the SC13 conference in Denver,puts NVIDIA's GPU accelerator outside of the high performance computing (HPC) realm for the first time, pairs it with IBM's Power8 CPU, and opens the door for use in enterprise-scale data centers. With big data in mind, the collaboration aims to enable IBM customers to more rapidly process, secure and analyze massive volumes of streaming data.

"This partnership will bring supercomputer performance to the corporate data center, expanding the use of GPU accelerators well beyond the traditional supercomputing and technical computing markets," said Ian Buck, vice president of Accelerated Computing at NVIDIA. "It will also provide existing supercomputing and high performance computing customers with new choices and technologies to build powerful, energy-efficient systems that drive innovation and scientific discovery."

NVIDIA and IBM also plan to integrate the joint-processing capabilities of NVIDIA Tesla GPUs with IBM POWER processors. By combining IBM POWER8 CPUs with energy-efficient GPU accelerators, the companies aim to deliver a new class of technology that maximizes performance and efficiency for all types of scientific, engineering, big data analytics and other high performance computing (HPC) workloads.

"Companies are looking for new and more efficient ways to drive business value from Big Data and analytics," said Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president, IBM Systems & Technology Group and Integrated Supply Chain. "The combination of IBM and NVIDIA processor technologies can provide clients with an advanced and efficient foundation to achieve this goal."

IBM Power Systems will fully support existing scientific, engineering and visualization applications developed with the NVIDIA CUDA programming model, allowing supercomputing centers and HPC customers to immediately take advantage of groundbreaking performance advantages. IBM also plans to make its Rational brand of enterprise software development tools available to supercomputing developers, making it easier for programmers to develop cutting-edge applications.