Published in Graphics

Russian boffins love their Nvidia GPUs

by on30 June 2016


Home PC is faster than a supercomputer

Russian researchers at the Lomonosov Moscow State University have taken a consumer-level Nvidia GPU and programmed it to beat a super-computer.

Their home computer running a consumer-level Nvidia GPU solved a problem in 15 minutes which then took a supercomputer three days.

The researchers wanted to test whether consumer-level tech would make an accessible alternative to supercomputers, in situations where many equations had to be run parallel to each other.

The GPU tackled few-body scattering equations, which describe how multiple quantum particles interact with each other. Where three or more of these bodies are involved, the equations become extremely difficult to calculate, involving a table containing tens or even hundreds of thousands of rows and columns of data.

The boffins used Nvidia’s software as well as custom programs they had penned themselves. They were surprised how well the GPU performed. Team leader Vladimir Kukulin said:

"We reached a speed we couldn't even dream of. The program computes 260 million complex double integrals on a desktop computer within three seconds. No comparison with supercomputers! My colleague from the University of Bochum in Germany carried out the calculations using one of the largest supercomputers in Germany with the famous blue gene architecture, which is actually very expensive. And what took his group two or three days we do in 15 minutes without spending a dime."

At the moment only a few groups around the world have the resources to perform these sorts of calculations, which hinders the overall progress of the fields of study related to them, including quantum mechanics and nuclear and atomic physics.

The processors used by the team retail for between US$300 – $500, which is far easier on the wallet than the hundreds of millions of dollars an institute can spend on a supercomputer. In fact, GPUs have been capable of this kind of application for the past 10 years or so, but their value is only now beginning to be appreciated.

Kukulin said that this work opens up new ways to analyse nuclear and resonance chemical reactions.

"It can also be useful for solving a large number of computing tasks in plasma physics, electrodynamics, geophysics, medicine and many other areas of science. We want to organize a kind of training course, where researchers from various scientific areas of peripheral universities that do not have access to supercomputers could learn to do on their PCs the same thing that we do."

Last modified on 30 June 2016
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