Nvidia (http://www.nvidia.com) has introduced its
next generation CUDA GPU architecture, codenamed
“Fermi.” An entirely new ground-up design, the
“Fermi” architecture is the foundation for the
world’s first computational graphics processing
units (GPUs), delivering breakthroughs in both
graphics and GPU computing, according to Jen-Hsun
Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia.
Presented at the company’s inaugural GPU
Technology Conference, in San Jose, California,
“Fermi” delivers a feature set that accelerates
performance on a wider array of computational
applications than ever before, he adds. Joining
Nvidia’s press conference was Oak Ridge National
Laboratory who announced plans for a new
supercomputer that will use Nvidia GPUs based on
the “Fermi” architecture. “Fermi” also garnered
the support of organizations including Bloomberg,
Cray, Dell, HP, IBM and Microsoft.
Huang says that, as the foundation for Nvidia’s
family of next generation GPUs namely GeForce,
Quadro and Tesla, “Fermi” features a host of new
technologies that are “must-have” features for
the computing space, including:
° C++, complementing existing support for C,
Fortran, Java, Python, OpenCL and DirectCompute;
° ECC, a critical requirement for datacenters and
supercomputing centers deploying GPUs on a large
scale;
° 512 CUDA Cores, featuring the new IEEE 754-2008 floating-point standard;
° Eight times the peak double precision
arithmetic performance over Nvidia’s last
generation GPU;
° Nvidia Parallel DataCache, the “world’s first
true” cache hierarchy in a GPU that speeds up
algorithms such as physics solvers, raytracing,
and sparse matrix multiplication where data
addresses are not known beforehand;
° Nvidia GigaThread Engine with support for
concurrent kernel execution, where different
kernels of the same application context can
execute on the GPU at the same time.
