Wednesday 14 March 2012

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Dell Mainstream Servers Get A Boost with NVIDIA GPUs

Posted: 14 Mar 2012 11:01 AM PDT

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Every server manufacturer announced support last week for the new Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs in their new models. That includes PC giant Dell, which announced, for the first time, that it is supporting Tesla GPUs in its mainstream Dell PowerEdge R720 servers. And, our new benchmarks demonstrate why.

The PowerEdge R270 is, by far, one of the most popular servers in the Dell server portfolio, one of the highest volume servers in the world, and often a top choice for IT organizations. The plethora of enterprise-ready peripheral options and highly flexible configurations make the server an easy purchase decision.

By including Tesla GPUs in the top-selling Dell server, GPU computing is now truly available to the mass market.  And, the mass market can now take advantage of GPU acceleration for a broad range of applications.

We benchmarked the new Dell PowerEdge R720s with two Tesla M2090s GPUs using the popular computational bio-chemistry applications NAMD, AMBER, and LAMMPS.  Results are below.

In all benchmarks, the Dell systems that included two GPUs were considerably faster than CPU-only configurations – anywhere from three to six times faster.

So the most popular Dell servers just got better…and much, much faster.

The Dell R720 configuration we benchmarked is:

  • Dual socket Intel Xeon® E5-2650L 1.80GHz (Sandy Bridge), 16 cores total
  • 64 GB, 1066 Mhz DDR3 (32 GB per CPU)
  • Two Tesla M2090 GPUs
  • Redhat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.2
  • NVIDIA driver version 295.20

Detailed data below:

NVIDIA Kicks Off Regular Windows 8 Driver Updates

Posted: 13 Mar 2012 01:39 PM PDT

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Two weeks after the release of Microsoft's Windows 8 Consumer Preview, we have released our first driver update for NVIDIA GeForce and Quadro GPUs.

This release, part of our partnership to support NVIDIA GPU-based systems, represents the start of regular NVIDIA driver updates for Windows 8. These drivers, version 296.17, are available for both GeForce and Quadro GPU-based desktops and notebooks on NVIDIA.com, as well as on Microsoft's Windows Update.

Download the new NVIDIA 296.17 drivers for the Windows 8 Consumer Preview

Windows 7 and Windows XP users can use today an equivalent driver, version 296.10 (WHQL-certified), from GeForce.com. These drivers are a quick refresh from the recent GeForce 295.73 drivers and a must-have for gamers looking for the best experience in upcoming games like Blacklight: Retribution. These drivers also carry all of the R295 goodness that I told you about just a couple weeks ago.

Download the new GeForce 296.10 drivers for Windows 7/Vista and Windows XP

A final note about NVIDIA's Windows 8 driver support: NVIDIA's Windows 8 drivers support all the features of the new Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) v1.2, as well as award-winning NVIDIA 3D Vision and 3DTV Play products, allowing you to play more than 600 games, watch Blu-ray movies and view photos – all in 3D. With Windows 8's new built-in stereoscopic 3D support in DirectX 11, 3D Vision is poised to provide users the best platform for games and applications.

For more information on 3D Vision and 3DTV Play support in Windows 8, please read the Windows 8 FAQs http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/list/kw/Win83D.

For more information on the Microsoft Windows 8 Consumer Preview, please visit: http://preview.windows.com

The list of supported NVIDIA GPUs for Windows 8 can be found here on NVIDIA.com.

Enjoy the new drivers and please let us know what you think in the comments below!

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