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The Fastra II is a desktop supercomputer designed for tomography.〔(【引用サイトリンク】 title=Main page of the official Fastra II website )〕 It was built in late 2009 by the ASTRA (All Scale Tomographic Reconstruction Antwerp) group of researchers of the IBBT (Interdisciplinary institute for BroadBand Technology) 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 (built in 2008). The Fastra II was determined to be over three times faster than the Fastra I, which in turn was slightly faster than a 512-core cluster.〔 However, because of the number of GPUs in the computer, the system initially suffered from several issues, like the system refusing to reboot and overheating due to a lack of space between the video cards.〔〔 == Development == The computer was built as a researching and demonstration project by the ASTRA group of researchers at the Vision Lab in the University of Antwerp in Belgium, one of the researchers being Joost Batenburg.〔 Unlike other modern supercomputers such as the Cray Jaguar and the IBM Roadrunner, which cost millions of euros, the Fastra II only uses consumer hardware, costing €6,000 in total.〔 The Fastra II's predecessor, the Fastra I, has 4 dual-GPU GeForce 9800 GX2 video cards, for a total of 8 GPUs. At that time, the ASTRA group needed a motherboard that had four PCI Express x16 slots with double-spacing between each of them. The only such motherboard the ASTRA group could find at that time was the MSI K9A2 Platinum, which has four such slots.〔(【引用サイトリンク】 title=Fastra I specifications )〕 In 2009, the Asus P6T7 WS Supercomputer motherboard, which the Fastra II uses, was released, which has seven PCI Express x16 slots. The Fastra II has six faster dual-GPU GeForce GTX 295 video cards, and a single-GPU GeForce GTX 275, for a total of 13 GPUs. In the Fastra II, the GPUs mainly perform tomographic reconstruction. The technique which allows GPUs to perform general-purpose tasks like this outside of gaming, instead of CPUs, is called GPGPU, general-purpose computing on graphics processing units. Overheating caused by the lack of space between the video cards forces researchers using the FASTRA II to keep the side panel door open, so that the video cards can get regular air, decreasing the overall temperature inside the case.〔 Due to the number of GPUs in the system, its initial boot was unsuccessful. This was because its motherboard uses a 32 bit BIOS, which only had approximately 3 GB of address space for the video cards. However, Asus managed to provide them a specialized BIOS that entirely skipped the address space allocation of the GTX 295 video cards.〔(【引用サイトリンク】 title=Technical details )〕 The BIOS-replacement coreboot was not tested. All seven PCI Express x16 slots in the Asus P6T7 motherboard were used in the building of the Fastra II computer. However, the video cards in the Fastra II are wide enough to require two such slots each. To solve this issue, the researchers came up with flexible PCI Express cables, and Tones developed a custom cage which allowed the video cards to suspend over the motherboard.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Fastra II」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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