Solid Mobile Phone: Manifold Sets New GIS Record for Supercomputing

Manifold.net today announced a new world record for the number of
processors used in a personal computer for Geographic Information
Systems (GIS) processing. At the company's 2009 European User Meeting
in London, Manifold demonstrated an upcoming new software product that
simultaneously utilized over 1440 processor cores to perform a remote
sensing image computation at supercomputer speed with over 3.5
teraflops of performance. Manifold demonstrated the new software on a
desktop 64-bit Windows PC equipped with three NVIDIA GTX 295 GPU cards
costing less than $500 each.

The demonstration showed how a desktop Windows PC using inexpensive
consumer components and running a $245 Manifold GIS package can run
over one hundred times faster than any other GIS or remote sensing
software package, even those costing tens of thousands of dollars more
than Manifold.

"Modern technology provides significantly lower cost as well as much
greater performance," commented Dimitri Rotow, a product manager at
Manifold. He continued, "The desktop supercomputer technology we
utilize costs almost nothing to deploy, as little as $80 to start, yet
it far outperforms any competitor's software, even packages costing 50
times as much. By using inexpensive, massively parallel GPUs Manifold
can provide teraflops of computing performance for only a few hundred
dollars."

NVIDIA GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) employ multiple parallel
processing units for faster performance. Manifold's new software uses
massively parallelized programming to execute general purpose
computations within those parallel processing units for much faster
performance than possible on the main CPU. Because of NVIDIA's success
in consumer graphics markets, over 100 million NVIDIA GPUs have
already been installed in computers throughout the world, ready to
provide supercomputer speed to anyone using Manifold's new product.
NVIDIA GPU cards are widely sold by many vendors for as little as $80
per card.