Looking at new computational methods for tomography—a technique used by medical scanners to create 3D images—University of Antwerp researchers have built a budget supercomputer using four Nvidia 9800 GX2 graphics cards (a total of eight GPUs with 1,024 stream processors) as its super-calculating soul, which "perform as fast as 350 modern CPU cores."


This kind of setup works really well for tomography because the number-crunching can be done in parallel and is highly vectorized—the same kind of stuff the medical community and Air Force were eye-balling the PS3 for, since the Cell uses a similar kind of architecture.

PS3 Cell Chip to Tackle Medical Imaging IBM and the Mayo Clinic have announced that they will be using the Cell Broadband Engine, the same… Read more


On the other hand, it wouldn't be so great for more general computing stuffs that can't be crunched in parallel (multiple processors working at once). Either way, watch the video, gigaflops to terabytes, it's the nerdiest thing you'll see this week. [FASTRA, Thanks Toji]