My research group will be building our new (smallish) research supercomputer NAK:(NVIDIA Athlon XP cluster in Kentucky) on Friday, April 16, 2010 from 10A to 4P in FPAT672. UK students and other interested Lexingtonians are invited to come help with the build, so if you would like to play with the guts of a big cluster, you will be welcome at the (re)Build Party.
If you can come up with a better phrase (with a better acronym) for the “NoBuPAG” principle discussed in the machine description, that will be really welcome too.
NAK will provide a testbed for continuing research into building tools for performing useful compute work on GPUs. It presents a different model than the conventional GPU as an attached co-processor to powerful compute nodes model, which has thus far proven impractical to program for. Instead, NAK treats the nodes as “Nothing But Power And Ground” (and a network interface…), and will be running all of the heavy compute on the GPUs themselves, through a mechanism extended from our MOG project.
