Redwood City (CA) – Building a supercomputer has become a whole lot easier with stream processing solutions such as Peakstream or Nvidia’s CUDA technology. Peakstream today announced a new version of its application interface, which enables developers to take advantage of the floating point horsepower of graphics cards under Windows.

The new software, currently offered as a beta download from Peakstream’s website, follows a Linux version that was released in September of last year. According to the developer, Peakstream Workstation for Microsoft Windows combines a set of extensive Math libraries in C/C++ with an optimizing runtime and a set of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 tool extensions to simplify the development of multi-threaded applications for multi-core CPUs and GPUs.

The  application interface and virtual machine handles work scheduling and memory management and a way for programmers to easily access a combined system of processors - such as x86 or Cell chips - and graphics cards. According to Peakstream, the system requires only a "minimal learning curve." The company recommends ATI graphics processors for its software; it was unclear if the software also supports Nvidia-based graphics cards. However, in an earlier conversation company officials told TG Daily that the addition of graphics cards and Peakstream software to a computer can increase the system performance by a factor of up to 20x under certain applications.

Peakstream claims that it has developed a new software platform that can create supercomputers by combining the processing capability of common CPUs with the resources of modern graphics cards. Simply by adding the horsepower of graphics cards to an existing computer, the company claims that the original system can be accelerated by a factor of 20x.

The Linux version of the software is currently priced at $2000 per computing node with volume discounts being available for large cluster systems.

Comments (0)

Show/Hide comment form