Fastra II

The computer was built as a researching and demonstration project by the ASTRA group of researchers at the Vision Lab in the University of Antwerp in Belgium, one of the researchers being Joost Batenburg. Unlike other modern supercomputers such as the Cray Jaguar and the IBM Roadrunner, which cost millions of euros, the Fastra II only uses consumer hardware, costing €6,000 in total.

The Fastra II's predecessor, the Fastra I, has 4 dual-GPU GeForce 9800 GX2 video cards, for a total of 8 GPUs. At that time, the ASTRA group needed a motherboard that had four PCI Express x16 slots with double-spacing between each of them. The only such motherboard the ASTRA group could find at that time was the MSI K9A2 Platinum, which has four such slots.{{cite web | url=http://fastra.ua.ac.be/en/specs.html | title=Fastra I specifications | publisher=Fastra.ua.ac.be | access-date=6 January 2011}} In 2009, the Asus P6T7 WS Supercomputer motherboard, which the Fastra II uses, was released, which has seven PCI Express x16 slots.{{cite web | url=http://www.motherboards.org/reviews/motherboards/1913_1.html | title=ASUS P6T7 WS Supercomputer Motherboard Review :: Introduction | publisher=Motherboards.org | date=25 June 2009 | access-date=6 January 2011}} The Fastra II has six faster dual-GPU GeForce GTX 295 video cards, and a single-GPU GeForce GTX 275, for a total of 13 GPUs. In the Fastra II, the GPUs mainly perform tomographic reconstruction. The technique which allows GPUs to perform general-purpose tasks like this outside of gaming, instead of CPUs, is called GPGPU, general-purpose computing on graphics processing units.

Overheating caused by the lack of space between the video cards forces researchers using the FASTRA II to keep the side panel door open, so that the video cards can get regular air, decreasing the overall temperature inside the case.

Due to the number of GPUs in the system, its initial boot was unsuccessful. This was because its motherboard normally uses a 32 bit BIOS, which only had approximately 3 GB of address space for the video cards. However, Asus managed to provide them a specialized BIOS that entirely skipped the address space allocation of the GTX 295 video cards.{{cite web | url=http://fastra2.ua.ac.be/?page_id=214 | title=Technical details | publisher=Fastra2.ua.ac.be | access-date=16 December 2010 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100820053818/http://fastra2.ua.ac.be/?page_id=214 | archive-date=20 August 2010 | url-status=dead }} The BIOS-replacement coreboot was not tested.

All seven PCI Express x16 slots in the Asus P6T7 motherboard were used in the building of the Fastra II computer. However, the video cards in the Fastra II are wide enough to require two such slots each. To solve this issue, the researchers came up with flexible PCI Express cables, and Tones developed a custom cage which allowed the video cards to suspend over the motherboard.

Like the Fastra I, the Fastra II uses a Lian Li PC-P80 Armorsuit case, which has 10 expansion slots. The motherboard in the Fastra II was at that time the only workstation motherboard that had seven full-sized PCI Express x16 slots.

The memory modules were initially six 2 GB modules, but were later upgraded to 4 GB each, for a total of 24 GB.{{cite web | url=http://fastra2.ua.ac.be/?p=647 | title=System upgrade: 24GB of DDR3 RAM | publisher=Fastra2.ua.ac.be | date=23 April 2010 | access-date=16 December 2010 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110527145328/http://fastra2.ua.ac.be/?p=647 | archive-date=27 May 2011 | url-status=dead }}

Instead of an eighth dual-GPU video card, the single-GPU GTX 275 is in the computer because, out of all the video cards in the Fastra II, the GTX 275 is the only one the Fastra II's BIOS can fully initialize. The total amount of GPUs is 13. The video cards together bring 12 teraflops of computing power.{{cite web |last=Samaniego |first=Joey |date=14 December 2009 |title=Fastra II: 12 Teraflops of Computing Power on a Desktop |url=https://www.pcworld.com/article/515532/fastra_ii_supercomputer.html |access-date=22 September 2010 |website=PC World |publisher=PC World}} Four of the six GTX 295 video cards have 2 PCBs, while the other two have only 1 PCB.

According to the benchmarks on its official website, the Fastra II is faster and more power efficient than its competitors, including the Fastra I and the Tesla C1060 video card.{{cite web | url=http://Fastra2.ua.ac.be/?page_id=53 | title=Fastra II benchmarks | publisher=Fastra2.ua.ac.be | access-date=21 September 2010 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100822180429/http://fastra2.ua.ac.be/?page_id=53 | archive-date=22 August 2010 | url-status=dead }} The benchmarks were performed on the Fastra II, the Fastra I, a 512-core cluster (consisting of Opteron CPUs), an Nvidia Tesla C1060 workstation card on an Intel Core i7 940 CPU, and on an Intel Core i7 940 CPU itself. The Fastra II is over three times faster than the Fastra I in CT slice reconstruction speed. Although the Fastra II consumes more power than the Fastra I, it's nearly 3 times as energy efficient as the Fastra I, and over 300 times as energy efficient as the 512-core cluster. The video cards run at 37 degrees Celsius when idle, and at 60 degrees Celsius at full load.

File:Fastra II bone resolution quality.png|Image showing the differences between the Fastra I and the Fastra II in spatial resolution that is required to analyze changes of bone parameters

The operating system is CentOS, a community driven Linux distribution and Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone.

The Fastra II received a positive public impression. Techie.com called it the "world's most powerful desktop-sized supercomputer", describing it as a computer with "so much power in such a small space."{{cite web | last=Firmalan | first=Nepsurl | url=http://www.techie.com.ph/news/fastra-ii-is-worlds-most-powerful-desktopsized-supercomputer | title=Fastra II is world's most powerful desktop-sized supercomputer | publisher=Techie.com | date=15 December 2009 | access-date=5 January 2011 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110224022434/http://www.techie.com.ph/news/fastra-ii-is-worlds-most-powerful-desktopsized-supercomputer | archive-date=24 February 2011 | url-status=usurped}} iTech News Net called it "the Most Powerful Desktop Supercomputer".{{cite web | url=http://www.itechnews.net/2009/12/20/fastra-ii-the-most-powerful-desktop-supercomputer/ | title=FASTRA II – the Most Powerful Desktop Supercomputer | publisher=iTechnews.net | author=Sze | date=20 December 2009 | access-date=5 January 2011}}

Fastra II relies on Nvidia's Scalable Link Interface (SLI) and is therefore limited to the number of GPUs supported by it, the vendor, and the free and open-source device drivers. The Fastra II's motherboard is designed for workstations, and the computer is mainly being used in hospitals for medical imaging.{{cite web | url=http://Fastra2.ua.ac.be/?page_id=49 | title=Fastra II specifications | access-date=6 June 2010 | publisher=Fastra2.ua.ac.be | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100505014638/http://fastra2.ua.ac.be/?page_id=49 | archive-date=5 May 2010 | url-status=dead }}

It remains to be seen whether another Fastra, featuring NVLink, first available with Pascal-based GPUs, will be built.

• Direct Rendering Infrastructure#GPGPU
• Debian-Med
• Beowulf cluster
• coreboot

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Category:2009 in science

Category:X86 supercomputers

Category:One-of-a-kind computers

Category:University of Antwerp