The surge in data centres is leading to all sorts of technological advancement, solution providers are put to test in their capability in meeting unprecedented computational demands. One of those taking the challenge on its stride is NVIDIA.

Giving relentless support, the new NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU accelerator for PCIe servers, delivers massive leaps in performance and value compared with CPU-based systems. Meeting the demand for supercomputing cycles which are much higher than ever. The majority of scientists are unable to secure adequate time on supercomputing systems to conduct their research, based on National Science Foundation.

In addition, high performance computing (HPC) technologies are increasingly required to power computationally intensive deep learning applications, while researchers are applying AI techniques to drive advances in traditional scientific fields. The new GPU accelerator for PCIe meets these computational demands through the unmatched performance and efficiency of the NVIDIA Pascal GPU architecture. It enables the creation of “super nodes” that provide the throughput of more than 32 commodity CPU-based nodes and deliver up to 70 percent lower capital and operational costs .

“Accelerated computing is the only path forward to keep up with researchers’ insatiable demand for HPC and AI supercomputing,” said Ian Buck, vice president of accelerated computing at NVIDIA. “Deploying CPU-only systems to meet this demand would require large numbers of commodity compute nodes, leading to substantially increased costs without proportional performance gains.

Dramatically scaling performance with fewer, more powerful Tesla P100-powered nodes puts more dollars into computing instead of vast infrastructure overhead.

Its available in a standard PCIe form factor and is compatible with today’s GPU-accelerated servers. It is also optimised to power the most computationally intensive AI and HPC data center applications. A single Tesla P100-powered server delivers higher performance than 50 CPU-only server nodes when running the AMBER molecular dynamics code, and is faster than 32 CPU-only nodes when running the VASP material science application .

The Tesla P100 for PCIe is the latest addition to the NVIDIA Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform. Key features include:

 Unmatched application performance for mixed-HPC workloads – Delivering 4.7 teraflops and 9.3 teraflops of double-precision and single-precision peak performance, respectively, a single Pascal-based Tesla P100 node provides the equivalent performance of more than 32 commodity CPU-only servers.

 CoWoS with HBM2 for unprecedented efficiency – The Tesla P100 unifies processor and data into a single package to deliver unprecedented compute efficiency. An innovative approach to memory design — chip on wafer on substrate (CoWoS) with HBM2 — provides a 3x boost in memory bandwidth performance, or 720GB/sec, compared to the NVIDIA Maxwell architecture.

 Page Migration Engine for simplified parallel programming – Frees developers to focus on tuning for higher performance and less on managing data movement, and allows New NVIDIA Tesla P100 Accelerator Delivers Massive Throughput Boost for HPC Data Centers applications to scale beyond the GPU physical memory size with support for virtual memory paging. Unified memory technology dramatically improves productivity by enabling developers to see a single memory space for the entire node.

 Unmatched application support – With 410 GPU-accelerated applications, including nine of the top 10 HPC applications, the Tesla platform is the world’s leading HPC computing platform.

Availability NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU accelerator for PCIe-based systems is expected to be available beginning in Q4 2016 from NVIDIA reseller partners and server manufacturers, including Cray, Dell, HP and IBM.