Belgian scientists develop desktop supercomputer
Belgian scientists have developed a desktop supercomputer which can carry out computations as fast as a cluster of hundreds of ordinary computers. The researchers, who are based at the University of Antwerp, achieved their breakthrough by turning to gaming hardware. The researchers' work focuses on the development of new computational methods for a type of medical screening called tomography. In tomography, a three dimensional image of a patient's internal organs is generated by combining data from a large number of x-rays taken from different angles. As the images are often rather large, reconstructing them in detail can take weeks using an ordinary computer. One way round this problem is to use a cluster, in which hundreds of PCs are linked up to work in parallel. However, this arrangement also has a number of drawbacks; it is expensive, is not always available, it takes up a lot of space and it requires considerable maintenance. In a bid to speed up the computation process while keeping down costs, the researchers turned to gaming hardware. They found that 3D graphics cards, which were originally designed for use playing 3D computer games, are also extremely well suited to carrying out tomography computations. Each graphics processor (GPU) contains 128 subprocessors that are all able to work in parallel. With appropriate programming of the GPU, many calculations can be carried out simultaneously. Just a single graphics card turns out to be 40 times more powerful than an ordinary computer when it comes to tomography related calculations. However, the Antwerp researchers wanted even more speed, and so they constructed a desktop supercomputer called FASTRA. FASTRA is equipped with four dual-GPU graphics cards, and having these eight GPUs working in parallel enables FASTRA to perform as fast as 350 normal computers. In practical terms, this reduces the time taken to carry out a tomography reconstruction task from several weeks to a matter of hours. In addition to being faster than other solutions, FASTRA is also greener than using a cluster, consuming less than 1,500W of power. It is also considerably cheaper. 'As far as we know, this is the first normal PC in the world that actually has eight GPUs,' comments Dr Joost Batenburg of the University of Antwerp in a video on the research team's website. 'Best of all, because it's made of consumer hardware, it costs less than €4,000, making it affordable for any scientist.' The scientists use the computer for a range of medical and industrial uses. In the medical field, they work closely with scientists studying bone diseases such as osteoporosis. Information from tomography is used in the development of new drugs for these diseases, and with FASTRA, the results of bone scans are made available to the bone researchers much faster. FASTRA is also being used for the benefit of Antwerp's diamond trade. Cutting raw diamonds is a delicate task, which requires detailed knowledge of the raw diamond's shape. In one case, a diamond was too large for the scanner, and the resulting x-rays were too small to contain the whole diamond. By using prior knowledge, the FASTRA team were able to reconstruct the whole diamond accurately in a matter of hours. Meanwhile Dr Batenburg is enthusiastic about FASTRA's prospects. 'For tomography, we believe that with FASTRA, we've created the most powerful single PC in the world for doing our computations,' he comments.
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