Microway Launches Whisperstation-PSC

By Peter Varhol

  Microway, Inc. (Plymouth, MA) announced the immediate availability of WhisperStation-PSC,  its NVIDIA Tesla-based personal supercomputer. Leveraging its history of delivering HPC solutions since 1982, Microway extends its offering of fully integrated workstations by featuring the Tesla GPUs and the CUDA SDK. WhisperStation-PSC contains up to 4 Tesla C1060 GPUs, 2 AMD or Intel processors, 64 GB memory and optional RAID storage.

  In addition to the WhisperStation-PSC configuration, Microway delivers the S1070 Tesla server in the HPC clusters it designs. Currently the company is building a 24-node computational cluster with 48 Tesla GPUs for a large research laboratory.

  The CUDA SDK tool suite and Tesla GPUs are helping scientists solve their most important HPC challenges in industries where OpenMP applications employing hundreds of parallel threads are used to speed up floating point operations. These products are transforming computationally intensive applications such as industrial design, financial modeling, space exploration, CFD simulation, and medical imaging. Also introduced at SC08 and available from Microway is The Portland Group’s PGI 8.0 release that includes a technology preview of the PGI accelerator programming strategy. PGI 8.0 compilers accept new directives that allow users to select compute intensive regions of Linux x64 Fortran and C99 programs and automatically offload them to an NVIDIA GPU.

  The key benefits of each Tesla GPU include a massively multithreaded architecture with 240 floating point processor cores, 933 GFLOPS single precision floating point throughput with support for double precision, and 4 GB high-speed memory at 102 GBps bandwidth.

Sources:  Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.