CSIRO, a research facility in Australia, is expected to announce the launch of its new hybrid CPU-GPU supercomputer this week.

The setup will be comprised of 256 2.8GHz Intel Xeon E5462  processors and 64 NVIDIA Tesla S1070  cards for a grand total of 1024 CPU cores and 256 GPU cores. The supercomputer will store its research on an 80TB Hitachi SAN

The use of Tesla GPUs to accelerate scientific computations is a key highlight of this supercomputer. By harnessing the power of both the CPUs and GPUs in the setup, CSIRO believes their new supercomputer will deliver performance equivalent to that of a CPU-only supercomputer twice its size.

CSIRO intends to use their new resources to aid research in many fields, including biology, chemistry, astronomy, and meteorology.