Lenovo Refreshes Workstations With Desktop Supercomputer

Lenovo on Tuesday refreshed its workstation line with two computers available with the Nvidia Tesla C1060 platform for companies looking to turn the systems into desktop supercomputers.

The ThinkStation S20 and D20 are designed for professionals in fields such as computer-aided design, digital content creation, and oil and gas. The systems offer a choice of the latest Intel Xeon quad-core or dual-core 5500 and W3500 series processors. In addition, the systems come with the Nvidia Quadro line of professional graphics cards or optional ATI FirePro graphics from Advanced Micro Devices.

Companies looking to convert the systems into personal supercomputers can opt for the Tesla C1060 graphics processing unit. The GPU, introduced last year, offers 1 teraflop, or a trillion computational operations per second, and 4 GB of memory. Nvidia claims the platform, which offers 240 processing cores, delivers 10 times the computational power of a computer with two quad-core CPUs while using about the same amount of energy.

In order to run high-performance computing applications on the systems, however, the heavily computational portions of software would have to be run through Nvidia's CUDA compiler. CUDA, or Compute Unified Device Architecture, is a development environment based on the C programming language.

Other components of the Lenovo systems include a hard-disk drive with up to 1 TB of storage, up to 96 GB of system memory, and an optional Blu-ray disc burner. The workstations are available with Windows Vista or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2.

For companies looking for more environmentally friendly systems, the workstations use 50% recycled content and meet Energy Star 5.0 standards. Energy Star is an international standard for energy-efficient products.

Lenovo is showcasing the systems with Epic Games at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week. Epic is the creator of the Unreal series of games and the Gears Of War franchise.

The ThinkStation S20 and D20 are scheduled to be available this month. Prices start at $1,070 and $1,550, respectively. The systems will be available through Lenovo and channel partners.

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This story was edited to clarify the release date of the computers.