Several research groups at Boston University are leveraging the power of graphics processors, known as GPUs, for scientific computing. Through this blog, we hope to disseminate the research output of these groups, as well as to share our experiences and successes.
Experimental GPU cluster at BU
Thanks to NSF and NIH funding, a new GPU-enabled computational cluster has been installed at Boston University. The cluster offers peak performance in excess of 32 teraflop/s (or 32 million million operations per second), at an unprecedentedly low cost for such number-crunching power.
This supercomputer will be used by the principal investigators for research in particle physics and fluid dynamics (Richard Brower, Lorena Barba, Claudio Rebbi), as well as bioinformatics and computational biology (Martin Herbordt). An additional goal is to foster a “GPU community” at BU; to this end, the cluster will also be made available to other researchers for exploratory projects. This initiative has already seen involvement from several other research groups.
In November 2009, a collection of faculty, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students came together to learn about GPU computing in a workshop organized by the co-PIs of the NSF-funded project “Experimental GPU cluster for experimental physics.” This workshop, dubbed GPU@BU, was attended by researchers from all around the Boston area — including Harvard, MIT, Northeastern, and Brown — as well as distinguished guest speakers from NVIDIA Research and Nagasaki University.