Fastra II
The FASTRA II is a desktop supercomputer, designed for tomography.[1] It was built in late 2009 by the Belgium Internet computer shop Tones.be as the successor to the FASTRA I (built in 2008). Unlike other modern supercomputers, such as the Cray Jaguar and IBM Roadrunner, which cost millions of euros, the FASTRA II uses only consumer hardware, costing 6000 euros in total.[1]
Development
The computer was built as a researching and demonstration project and idea, by the Dutch ASTRA group of researchers at the Vision Lab in the University of Antwerp in Belgium, one of the researchers being Joost Batenburg.[1]
The supercomputer boasts six Asus dual-GPU GeForce GTX 295 video cards, and a single GeForce GTX 275 video card, also from Asus, for a total of 13 GPUs and 12 TeraFLOPS of computing power.[2][3] Four of the six GTX 295 video cards have 2 PCBs, while the other two have only 1 PCB.[3]
Issues
Due to the massive amount of heat caused by the lack of space between all of the video cards, the researchers are forced to keep the side panel door open, so that the video cards can get regular air, and therefore decreases the overall temperature inside the case.[4]
Benchmarks
According to the benchmarks on its official website, the FASTRA II is faster and more power efficient than its competitors, including the FASTRA I and Tesla C1060.[4]
Full specifications
The case is a Lian Li PC-P80 Armorsuit. The motherboard is an Asus P6T7 WS Supercomputer, which at the time was the only workstation motherboard that has seven full-sized PCI Express 2.0 slots. The CPU is a quad-core Intel Core i7 920. The system also has six 2 GB DDR3 memory modules from Corsair Memory, for a total 12 GB. All modules are running at 1333 mHz. The hard drive is a Samsung Spinpoint F3 1 TB. There are three power supplies, all from Thermaltake: one Toughpower 1500 Watt, and three smaller PowerExpress 450 Watt. The video cards are six dual-GPU Geforce GTX 295s from Asus and a single GTX 275, also from Asus, for a total of 13 GPUs. The operating system is CentOS 5.3.[3]
References
- ^ a b c "Main page of the official FASTRA II website". Fastra2.ua.ac.be. Retrieved 21 September 2010.
- ^ "Fastra II: 12 Teraflops of Computing Power on a Desktop". PC World. 15 December 2009. Retrieved 22 September 2010.
- ^ a b c "FASTRA II specifications". Fastra2.ua.ac.be. Retrieved 6 June 2010.
- ^ a b "FASTRA II benchmarks". Fastra2.ua.ac.be. Retrieved 21 September 2010.