SCIENCE

NVIDIA announced the availability of a limited-edition GPU Starter Kit from HP, a pre-configured system that provides researchers with a ready-to-use GPU computing cluster, straight out of the box. It consists of eight HP ProLiant SL390 G7 servers, containing 24 NVIDIA Tesla M2070 GPUs, 16 CPUs, and is pre-configured with the latest NVIDIA CUDA 4.0 parallel computing software.

Designed for ease of deployment and to address the growing availability of major GPU-enabled scientific applications, the GPU Starter Kit enables every university, government research department and enterprise customer to quickly deploy a rack of GPU-accelerated servers. The system delivers 13.5 teraflops of peak performance and is priced at $99,000, roughly 50 percent below the typical list price. The kit also includes a broad set of third-party development tools at discounted prices to facilitate application optimization.

"Growing demand for GPU computing has fueled the need for a fully integrated, robust and affordable development platform that enables developers to easily create new, accelerated applications," said Sumit Gupta, manager of Tesla products at NVIDIA. "As a result, NVIDIA and HP developed the GPU Starter Kit to remove some of the last hurdles to the mass adoption of GPU computing -- namely, the cost and time of system implementation."