Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

The computer graphic card producer NVIDIA released information on the Personal Supercomputer named "Tesla Personal Supercomputer". This computer is calculated to be 250 times faster than standard PCs today.

Weeks long calculations can be shortened to just a few hours with Tesla PSC (Personal SuperComputer:)) Thans to the GPUs used in the Tesla system is 3 or 4 Tesla C1060 computing processors with 4GB of dedicated memory per GPU. It offers the performance of a cluster in a desktop system, delivering close to 4 teraflops of performance.

Pretty much anything that you do on your PC that takes a lot of time can be accelerated with this. These supercomputers can improve the time it takes to process info by 1,000 times. If you imagine it takes a week to get a result (from running an experiment), you can only do it 52 times a year. If it takes you minutes, you can do it constantly, and learn just as much in a day. (Chief Scientist of NVIDIA - David Kirk)

Some of the comparisons and ideas on Tesla are remarkable:

Synchronize a movie to an iPod normally takes up to 6 hours now can be done by Tesla within 20 minutes

New computer applications/games can be written to optimize the multi-tasking graphic ability of Tesla so that motion graphics can be presented at much higher quality than the best computer graphics today.

Tesla would allow doctors who will be able to process results for brain and body scans within hours instead of the days taken on a regular PC.

With it's high computing speed, Tesla will also help scientists to run hundreds of thousands of simulations in order to shortlist drugs that may likely be a cure to diseases such as cancer and malaria.

The biggest question on this computer would be affordability. Unfortunately, it's still priced at the much higher end, well , it is a Super Computer after all. It's suggested marking price is at US$6,000 today. But this price will be lowered dramatically in no time just as all the other hardware on the market.

At first Tesla will be sold to the scientific and research institutes and organizations. Then Dell will later bring it to the consumer market.

There seems to be some debates around if this personal supercomputer is breaking the famous Moore's law in the technology world. A more thorough discussion on Tesla's computing power and technical specifications can be found here.