NEES at CU Boulder jumps in computation power

October 10, 2008

The Fast Hybrid Testing Laboratory acquired a desktop PC with eight cores to be used for computation during a realtime hybrid test. Initial testing has shown it to be capable of 72 billion floating operations per second (72 gigaFLOPS). In comparasion, recent single-processor desktops are in the 6-10 gigaFLOPS range. This increase in computation power will greatly increase the size and number of degrees of freedom of the analytical portion of a hybrid test. With this new computer we are hoping to be able to accomodate an analytical structure with possibly 3,000 degrees of freedom being calculated in real time while operating with a physical specimen. In previous tests we have only been able to achieve 140 degrees of freedom (that computer having a capacity of approximately 1.5 gigaFLOPS).