New Supercomputer Giveaway for Top Science Ideas NVIDIA's new
contest allows scientists to compete for a new supercomputing
core suitable for a petascale supercomputer. This image shows a
petascale Jaguar supercomputer at Oak Ridge National
Laboratory.. CREDIT: Oak Ridge National Laboratory Huge
supercomputers can do everything from simulating the universe's
Big Bang to modeling how the human brain works ? if universities
or labs can afford the expensive room-size computing clusters
costing tens of millions of dollars. A new contest offers
researchers the chance to win a supercomputer core by explaining
what they would do with the computing power equivalent to 20,000
laptops. The new supercomputer core is a Tesla Kepler graphics
processing unit (GPU) ? NVIDIA technology originally designed
for running graphics-rich video games. NVIDIA hopes the $3,000
units can deliver petaflop supercomputing (1 thousand trillion
calculations per second) at a relatively cheap price to boost
science and innovation around the w