The Next Big Leap In Computing

It may not look like much to you, but what you are looking at is going to be very important to scientific and mathematical computing in the future... starting now.

This is the Tesla from the graphics card company, NVidia. It is a "GPGPU", which basically means a video card that helps a computer perform computations not related to graphics.

You see, a few years back, graphic card designers realized that if you put a small, specialized computer onto a graphic card (a computer called a GPU... "graphic processing unit") that takes away from the main computer (the CPU... "central processing unit") the duties involved in sending an image to your computer screen, everything works a whole lot better.

The specialty of a video card's GPU is "floating point calculations" which is just technospeak for "big number crunching", which is, in essence, what computer graphics boils down to: Number crunching. (Computer CPUs are more diversified in their function, so aren't a fraction as good as an otherwise-equally-fast GPU at number crunching.)

Now, question: What do supercomputers do? You know: Those room-sized computers that measure weather and nuclear explosions and genomes? They are number crunchers too... but they do their number crunching by stringing together dozens or hundreds of those ineffecient CPUs to do their mathematical work.

So, that brings us to the "GPGPU"... a "General purpose GPU": This Tesla is essentially a video card, but instead of using its number crunching talents to send images to your computer monitor, it helps the CPU do any number crunching task assigned to it. In essence, it's an ultra-micro supercomputer... and it's only $1,500.

The real kicker is that you can take 3 of these Tesla GPGPUs and put them inside one single desktop computer to work together and instantly have a supercomputer that can do up to 12 trillion floating point calculations per second (which is called "12 terraflops") for a tiny fraction of the purchase and operating cost of an old room-sized supercomputer, but just as powerful.

So why is this important? Well, to people who work with number crunching (and that's a lot of people), this is the equivalent of the introduction of the first handheld scientific calculator. Basically, it takes the power of supercomputers, and the tasks they can perform, and the information they can provide, and the discoveries that they can uncover, and makes it all available to everyone, everywhere, whenever, however.

Very cool.