NVIDIA Launches Tesla K40 GPU Accelerator

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

NVIDIA (NVDA) unveiled the NVIDIA Tesla K40 GPU accelerator, which the company called its most efficient architecture ever, achieving 4.29 teraflops single-precision and 1.43 teraflops double-precision peak floating point performance. The new K40 features double the memory and up to 40 percent higher performance than the K20X GPU, and 10 times higher performance than today's fastest CPU.

"GPU accelerators have gone mainstream in the HPC and supercomputing industries, enabling engineers and researchers to consistently drive innovation and scientific discovery," said Sumit Gupta, general manager of Tesla Accelerated Computing products at NVIDIA. "With the breakthrough performance and higher memory capacity of the Tesla K40 GPU, enterprise customers can quickly crunch through massive volumes of data generated by their big data analytics applications."

Key features of the Tesla K40 GPU include 12GB of GDDR5 memory, 2,880 CUDA parallel processing cores, dynamic parallelism, and PCIe Gen-3 interconnect support. The Tesla K40 GPU accelerates the broadest range of scientific, engineering, commercial and enterprise HPC and data center applications. The NVIDIA Tesla K40 GPU accelerator is available immediately.

TACC, HP, NVIDIA partner for remote visualization project

The Texas Advanced Computer Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin, along with technology partners HP and NVIDIA,  announced that they will deploy Maverick in January 2014, a unique, powerful, high performance visualization and data analytics resource for the open science and engineering community. In addition to launching Maverick in January 2014, TACC this month is deploying Stockyard, a 20 petabyte large-scale global file system. Other systems for storing and analyzing data sets and for hosting web portals and gateways that provide access to scientific data will be announced in 2014.

The Maverick system will be comprised of five racks containing 132 HP ProLiant SL250s Gen 8 compute nodes and 14 HP ProLiant management, login, and Lustre router servers. Each of the 132 compute nodes will include two ten-core Intel Xeon E5-2680 V2 processors with 256GB of DDR3 1866MHz memory each, a Mellanox Connect-X3 FDR InfiniBand FlexibleLOM adaptor, and one NVIDIA Tesla K40 GPU accelerator. A Mellanox FDR InfiniBand interconnect will provide a high-performance communication platform.

"This system will be great for Big Data analysis — every node in Maverick will have large memory, a state-of-the-art GPU accelerator, and be connected to massive data storage," said Niall Gaffney, TACC's director of Data Intensive Computing. "Data scientists and all researchers will be able to use visual analysis techniques to explore data."

Partner support

The Tesla K40 GPU will be available in the coming months from a variety of server manufacturers, including Appro, ASUS, Bull, Cray, Dell, Eurotech, HP, IBM, Inspur, SGI, Sugon, Supermicro and Tyan, as well as from NVIDIA reseller partners.