While the new of Intel E5-2600-series processors deliver a considerable performance increase over previous generation CPUs, there's a revolution in processing going on in the background - the switch to a hybrid computing model.
The concept behind hybrid computing is to utilise the previously untapped computational capabilities of GPUs in concert with traditional CPUs to deliver a performance increase an order of magnitude greater than that possible using CPUs alone.
For example, a compute node consisting of a pair of Intel Xeon CPUs plus two Nvidia Tesla M2070 GPUs runs the popular molecular dynamics simulator NAMD a staggering 100% faster than a similarly specified CPU-only compute node. NAMD also scales extremely well across multiple GPUs, with eight nodes performing 200% better than eight CPU-only nodes.
To find out how much GPUs can speed up your code, we offer a free service which provides you with the ability to test drive our GPU cluster - the Nvidia SimCluster. To find out more, and being your test drive, check out our SimCluster.
