# Desktop super computer



## Graaf_van_Vlaanderen (Dec 18, 2009)

Interesting article how they're using GPU's to process 3D images 
of a CT-scanner.

http://fastra2.ua.ac.be/


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## saxon3049 (Dec 18, 2009)

That was prity sweet, shame they are not using FreeBSD but hey nothings perfect.


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## MG (Dec 19, 2009)

> At full speed, it can outperform a moderately sized cluster of state-of-the-art CPUs. And guess whatâ€¦ this system costs less than 6000 euros!



For medical scientists this can be interesting, but it's always the same. Some guys have built a machine that can do parallel processing of 3d-data and now they are pretending it's an extremely fast and cheap computer. But they seem to forget that it cannot be used for normal computing tasks because it actually never will be fast enough for that.
GPU's can not defeat CPU's. Only when they are processing very specific 3d-graphics related data. But who needs such computers?

Maybe it's possible to simulate logical circuitry and create a CPU in a virtual world, but I don't think it's faster than a Z80-based machine.


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## Graaf_van_Vlaanderen (Dec 19, 2009)

MG said:
			
		

> For medical scientists this can be interesting, but it's always the same. Some guys have built a machine that can do parallel processing of 3d-data and now they are pretending it's an extremely fast and cheap computer. But they seem to forget that it cannot be used for normal computing tasks because it actually never will be fast enough for that.
> GPU's can not defeat CPU's. Only when they are processing very specific 3d-graphics related data. But who needs such computers?
> 
> Maybe it's possible to simulate logical circuitry and create a CPU in a virtual world, but I don't think it's faster than a Z80-based machine.



That's what I was thinking too. I first found an article in a newspaper about this machine and there they're presenting this machine as an equivalent to a big cluster. Of course most people buy this. Then again for us it's old news that a GPU has much higher flops rate than a CPU. Just like it is old news that only 10% of the die size of a CPU is doing the arithmetic calculations.


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