THE BARCELONA Supercomputing Centre in Spain is developing a new hybrid supercomputer which will use NVIDIA Tegra ARM CPUs together with CUDA GPUs.
The new supercomputer effectively combines the performance characteristics of the new processors with the parallel processing capabilities of graphics processing units.
BSC is planning to develop the first large scale system based on this technology, with a near term goal of demonstrating two to five times improvement in energy efficiency compared with today's most efficient systems.
According to BSC, the ultimate research goal is to deliver exascale-level performance while using 15 to 30 times less power than current supercomputer architectures.
This EU Mont-Blanc Project will explore next-generation HPC architectures and develop a portfolio of exascale applications that run efficiently on these kinds of energy-efficient, embedded mobile technologies.
While CPUs in current systems consume around 40 percent or more of the energy, the Mont-Blanc architecture will use energy-efficient compute accelerators and ARM processors used in embedded and mobile devices to achieve a four- to 10-times increase in energy-efficiency by 2014.