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False Rumor - Oak Ridge Cancels NVIDIA Fermi Based Supercomputer!

Charlie Demerjian over at his SemiAccurate has posted up news that Oak Ridge National Laboratory has canceled their plans to use Fermi (GF100) based graphics cards in an upcoming supercomputer. Legit Reviews contacted several people at Oak Ridge National Laboratory this afternoon and found that a number of their employees in media relations had no idea what we were talking about. A little later we got on the phone with someone in Computing and Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and they stated that the SemiAccurate article was inaccurate and had no further comment. Legit Reviews also contacted Andrew Humber over at NVIDIA who informed us that the original press release that was issued in September is still valid and that nothing has changed. After talking to both Oak Ridge and NVIDIA it would appear that Charlie is just trying to stir the pot in order to boost traffic or living up to his sites name.

REMEMBER THE TRIUMPHANT WIN for Fermi at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory that Nvidia heavily touted at its GTC conference keynote? The supercomputer project was just killed for power reasons. Fermi power reasons. Whoops. That keynote 'win', shortly followed up by the showing of faked boards, was the highlight of an otherwise dull show, but it was used to show the potential of Fermi. Faked boards aside, putting GPUs into HPC clusters and supercomputers is what Nvidia has staked much of it's future on. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) win was a massive PR statement, even if it was unlikely to net Nvidia any money directly.

SemiAccurate

Posted by | Thu, Dec 17, 2009 - 03:44 PM