14 DAY TRIAL // Santa Clara, California-based NVIDIA, one of the world's leading vendors of high-performance graphics processing units, has just announced that it has collaborated with the Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft to promote the Tesla graphics processing units as solutions for high-performance parallel computing using Microsoft's Windows HPC Server 2008 operating system.
“The coupling of GPUs and CPUs illustrates the enormous power and opportunity of multicore co-processing,” said Dan Reed, corporate vice president of Extreme Computing at Microsoft. “NVIDIA’s work with Microsoft and the Windows HPC Server platform is helping enable scientists and researchers in many fields achieve supercomputer performance on diverse applications.”
As part of the collaboration between the two high-profile companies, NVIDIA has developed several GPU-enabled applications that have been optimized to work on the Windows HPC Server 2008 platform, including a ray tracing application that can be used as a tool for advanced photo-realistic modeling of automobiles.
“The scientific community was one of the first to realize the potential of the GPU to transform its work, observing speedups ranging from 20 to 200 times while using a range of compute-intensive applications,” said Andy Keane, general manager of NVIDIA’s Tesla business. “Researchers are increasingly using Windows on workstations and in data centers due to strong development tools like Microsoft Visual Studio, its ease of system management and its lower total cost of ownership.”
The combined efforts of the two companies have been put into place to enable developers to take advantage of NVIDIA's high-performance graphics processing units and the chip maker's famous CUDA architecture. According to NVIDIA, the technology has been adopted in a number of enterprise applications, including data mining, machine learning and business intelligence, as well as scientific applications like molecular dynamics, financial computing and seismic processing.
According to the company, the Tesla high-performance GPU computing products have been designed to support Microsoft's Windows XP and Windows Vista in the workstation space, while in the data center segment the GPUs support the Windows Server 2003 and 2008 operating systems.