Dedication is what you need – Manifold Record Breakers Again

At the recent Manifold UC in Denver the Manifold.net team demonstrated Manifold 9.0’s CUDA capabilities by carrying out a remote sensing operation (I’d like to know which one, but I’m guessing they’re keeping any new features under wraps until the official 9.0 roll out) on a monster of a custom machine, that probably cost no more than $4,000 – $5,000, with 4 nVidia GTX 295 GPU cards amounting to 1,920 processor cores.

The official announcement can be found here and they even have a guide on how to build your own supercomputer, just don’t burn your office/house down by leaving that hot rod of a machine unattended.

Manifold.net unveils details about the next version

The usually secretive guys from Manifold.net have put out a new press release, which reveals that the next version will have a serious amount of CUDA enabled features:

How is the new technology different from the CUDA support in Manifold’s existing Release 8 GIS product? – Manifold’s Release 8 GIS product was the first and is still the only GIS product to use NVIDIA CUDA for breathtaking speed increases, but it does so in a limited way. Manifold Release 8 provides almost three dozen CUDA-enabled functions for computations within an optional surface transform dialog. The new technology previewed in London runs automatically within hundreds of functions as a built-in part of Manifold and scales to many thousands of GPU stream processors. It utilizes a new, deeply parallel heterogeneous parallel processing architecture to take advantage of parallel processing within multicore CPUs to service massively parallel processing within GPUs. Since Release 8, Manifold has written millions of lines of code to make the new technology possible.

They also pencilled in the approximate release date:

The new Manifold technology previewed in London will ship in the first half of 2009 and will be offered to all Manifold Release 8 licensees for an update fee between $50 and $100 per license.

A possible rise in the upgrade cost, all previous upgrades were $50 or free, but even with my reduced IT budget that won’t make much of an impact.

Manifold 9 has been in development for around two years, lets hope that the wait has been worth it.