Have you ever considered how powerful of a rig you could build if you had enough money but only a regular desktop tower chassis to work with? No? Neither have I but then again I am not working for the University of Antwerp now, am I? It seems it has recently developed what it considers to be one of the most powerful computers in the world. Called the Fastra II (quite a simple name for such an important endeavor, don't you think?), this is the computer that I will be talking about in the following lines.

Though it only uses a 2.66GHz Core i7 processor, it achieves its extremely high performance thanks to the many video graphics cards that are added to it. How many? Well, six dual-GPU GeForce GTX 295 cards plus a single GeForce GTX 275. That means not one, not two, not even ten, but thirteen GPUs enhancing a regular computer's computational prowess. The PC can handle up to 12 teraflops of work and, of course, can also be used for 3D graphics, thanks to NVIDIA's CUDA technology.

If you like making estimations, you'll love this: it appears the computer is four times faster than the original Fastra super desktop computer. Take a 512-core regular computing cluster and compare it to the Fastra II and... you get the same results. As far as other system specifications are concerned, how about we check them out?

It seems it uses an ASUS P6T7 WS motherboard, 12GB of DDR3 memory, one 1,500W power supply and three 450W supplies, as well as a Lian-Li computer chassis to give it its extra pinch of “wow.” They university made a custom kernel for the CentOS Linux operating system, as well as added a custom cage in order to suspend the graphics cards. It is hoped to be used for tomography or creating 3D images of bones and organs from X-ray images. Quite cool, huh?


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