Published on 11/21/2008
The Tokyo institute of Technology has built a supercomputer called TSUBAME that uses NVIDIA's Tesla GPU. It is fast enough to enter the coveted list of top 500 most powerful computers in the world (as measured by the Linpack benchmark). The reason for switching to GPU computing is clear:
“In testing our key applications, the Tesla GPUs delivered speed-ups that we had never seen before, sometimes even orders of magnitude – a tremendous competitive boost for our scientists and engineers in reducing their time to solution.” (Satoshi Matsuoka, Tokyo Tech)
It's unclear what is the ratio between space, power consumption and performance, but something tells me that we will see more of these.