Consumers' relentless demand for better user experiences helps create the technology that drives high-performance computing forward.
Earlier this week, the "Titan" supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee was named the fastest supercomputer on earth. It was able to perform nearly 18 quadrillion floating-point calculations per second in the LINPACK benchmark (the high-performance computing industry's standard "speedometer") by accelerating its 560,640 CPUs with graphics processing units from NVIDIA. Intriguingly, this same "Kepler" GPU architecture also provides the graphics horsepower for Retina screens on the new Macbook Pro. This isn't a coincidence. Without ordinary consumers' relentless desire for next-generation user experiences -- sharper screens for their laptops, better graphics for their games, longer-lasting batteries for their mobile devices -- scientific supercomputing would be kind of screwed.
Source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=78504d0bb581e49ed6d7d50e2905eaf0
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