PCI Express, officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, meant to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus standards. It is the common motherboard interface for personal computers' graphics cards, capture cards, sound cards, hard disk drive host adapters, SSDs, Wi-Fi, and Ethernet hardware connections. PCIe has numerous improvements over the older standards, including higher maximum system bus throughput, lower I/O pin count, smaller physical footprint, better performance scaling for bus devices, a more detailed error detection and reporting mechanism, and native hot-swap functionality. More recent revisions of the PCIe standard provide hardware support for I/O virtualization.
Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) is a discontinued free and open-source operating system for high-performance computing on multi-core processor computer architectures, focusing on GPU systems and computers using the POWER7 processor. The original developer was Terra Soft Solutions, which was acquired by Fixstars in October 2008. Yellow Dog Linux was first released in the spring of 1999 for Apple Macintosh PowerPC-based computers. The last version, Yellow Dog Linux 7, was released on August 6, 2012. Yellow Dog Linux lent its name to the popular YUM Linux software updater, derived from YDL's YUP and thus called Yellowdog Updater, Modified.
The PowerPC 970, PowerPC 970FX, and PowerPC 970MP are 64-bit PowerPC CPUs from IBM introduced in 2002. Apple branded the 970 as PowerPC G5 for its Power Mac G5.
A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit initially designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal computers, workstations, and game consoles. After their initial design, GPUs were found to be useful for non-graphic calculations involving embarrassingly parallel problems due to their parallel structure. Other non-graphical uses include the training of neural networks and cryptocurrency mining.
Cell, a shorthand for Cell Broadband Engine Architecture, is a 64-bit multi-core microprocessor and microarchitecture that combines a general-purpose PowerPC core of modest performance with streamlined coprocessing elements which greatly accelerate multimedia and vector processing applications, as well as many other forms of dedicated computation.
Altix is a line of server computers and supercomputers produced by Silicon Graphics, based on Intel processors. It succeeded the MIPS/IRIX-based Origin 3000 servers.
The GeForce 7 series is the seventh generation of Nvidia's GeForce line of graphics processing units. This was the last series available on AGP cards.
The IBM BladeCenter was IBM's blade server architecture, until it was replaced by Flex System in 2012. The x86 division was later sold to Lenovo in 2014.
The nForce 600 chipset was released in the first half of November 2006, coinciding with the GeForce 8 series launch on November 8, 2006. The nForce 600 supports Intel's LGA 775 socket and AMD's Quad FX platform and replaces the nForce 500 series.
The AMD 700 chipset series is a set of chipsets designed by ATI for AMD Phenom processors to be sold under the AMD brand. Several members were launched in the end of 2007 and the first half of 2008, others launched throughout the rest of 2008.
The Namco System N2 is an arcade platform developed by Namco and NVIDIA. It runs on an nForce2-based motherboard developed by NVIDIA. It was announced that the system would be based on a NVIDIA GeForce graphics card, using the OpenGL API.
The Cray CX1 is a deskside workstation designed by Cray Inc., based on the x86-64 processor architecture. It was launched on September 16, 2008, and was discontinued in early 2012. It comprises a single chassis blade server design that supports a maximum of eight modular single-width blades, giving up to 96 processor cores. Computational load can be run independently on each blade and/or combined using clustering techniques.
The ZEGO is a rackmount server platform built by Sony, targeted for the video post-production and broadcast markets. The platform is based on Sony's PlayStation 3 as it features both the Cell Processor as well as the RSX 'Reality Synthesizer'. It is aimed to greatly speed up postproduction work, 3D rendering and video processing. In some respects it is rather similar to IBM's QS20/21/22 blades, although Sony seems to target the DCC markets rather than scientific like IBM, which can be seen by the inclusion of the RSX graphics processor in the ZEGO platform.
Nvidia Ion was a product line of Nvidia Corporation intended for motherboards of low-cost portable computers. It used graphics processing units and chipsets intended for small products.
The Fastra II is a desktop supercomputer designed for tomography. It was built in late 2009 by the ASTRA group of researchers of the IBBT VisionLab at the University of Antwerp and by Belgian computer shop Tones, in collaboration with Asus, a Taiwanese multinational computer product manufacturer, as the successor to the Fastra I.
ThinkStation is a brand of professional workstations from Lenovo announced in November 2007 and then released in January 2008. They are designed to be used for high-end computing and computer-aided design (CAD) tasks and primarily compete with other enterprise workstation lines, such as Dell's Precision, HP's Z line, Acer's Veriton K series, and Apple's Mac Pro line.
POWER9 is a family of superscalar, multithreading, multi-core microprocessors produced by IBM, based on the Power ISA. It was announced in August 2016. The POWER9-based processors are being manufactured using a 14 nm FinFET process, in 12- and 24-core versions, for scale out and scale up applications, and possibly other variations, since the POWER9 architecture is open for licensing and modification by the OpenPOWER Foundation members.
NVLink is a wire-based serial multi-lane near-range communications link developed by Nvidia. Unlike PCI Express, a device can consist of multiple NVLinks, and devices use mesh networking to communicate instead of a central hub. The protocol was first announced in March 2014 and uses a proprietary high-speed signaling interconnect (NVHS).
Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI), is a high-speed processor expansion bus standard for use in large data center computers, initially designed to be layered on top of PCI Express, for directly connecting central processing units (CPUs) to external accelerators like graphics processing units (GPUs), ASICs, FPGAs or fast storage. It offers low latency, high speed, direct memory access connectivity between devices of different instruction set architectures.
SXM is a high bandwidth socket solution for connecting Nvidia Compute Accelerators to a system. Each generation of Nvidia Tesla since the P100 models, the DGX computer series and the HGX boards come with an SXM socket type that realizes high bandwidth, power delivery and more for the matching GPU daughter cards. Nvidia offers these combinations as an end-user product e.g. in their models of the DGX system series. Current socket generations are SXM for Pascal based GPUs, SXM2 and SXM3 for Volta based GPUs, SXM4 for Ampere based GPUs, and SXM5 for Hopper based GPUs. These sockets are used for specific models of these accelerators, and offer higher performance per card than PCIe equivalents. The DGX-1 system was the first to be equipped with SXM-2 sockets and thus was the first to carry the form factor compatible SXM modules with P100 GPUs and later was unveiled to be capable of allowing upgrading to SXM2 modules with V100 GPUs.
