Researchers or I would say geeks at the Antwerp University have created a desktop supercomputer FASTRA II utilizing six NVIDIA GTX295 dual-GPU cards and one GTX 275 single GPU card to create a machine that most of the gamers haven’t even dreamt of yet. FASTRA II churns out 12Teraflops and uses ASUS motherboard with 7 PCI express slots having custom BIOS provided by Asus, 12GB DDR3 memory, multiple power supplies, Core i7, 1TB Samsung HDD and a little modified Lian-Li PC case. In case you are wondering, they have built this machine for their research in 3D imaging using high resolution scanner images, watch the video after the jump for more details.
Part of the Vision Lab of the University of Antwerp, the research group ASTRA focuses on the development of new computational methods for tomography. Tomography is a technique used in medical scanners to create three-dimensional images of the internal organs of patients, based on a large number of X-ray photos that are acquired over a range of angles. ASTRA develops new reconstruction techniques that lead to better reconstruction quality than classical methods.
One of the applications is 3D imaging of bone tissue in mice, which is commonly required in medicine research for osteoporosis. The structures of interest are at the resolution limits of current micro-CT scanners. The downside: computation time, which was already a major issue, increases even further.
Fortunately, these computations can be carried out in parallel on graphics hardware, much faster than when using normal CPUs. Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) are becoming more and more common now for all kinds of scientific computing. For suitable applications, a single GPU already has the computing power equivalent to a moderate CPU cluster. In collaboration with Tones.be and ASUS, so they have developed a PC design that incorporates 13 GPUs, resulting in a massive 12TFLOPS of computing power.
Watch this nicely made video of FASTRA II
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