EcoG: A Power-Efficient GPU Cluster Architecture for Scientific Computing

摘要

Although the scientific computing community has questioned graphics processing unit (GPU) efficiency when it comes to energy per operation, the latest Green500 list (www.green500.org) should put to rest these concerns. The Green500 sorts systems on the Top-500 list (www.top500.org) according to their power efficiency; on the latest list, released in November 2010, the number two and three systems were GPU-based. Here, we introduce the system that ranked at number three: EcoG, a 128-node GPU-accelerated cluster computer deployed at the US National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). EcoG was built through a joint effort by Nvidia, the University of Illinois Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, and NCSA's Innovative Systems Lab.