"The Colfax CXT4000 is a stable workstation and has excellent multi-GPU support. I use it to do algorithm and software development for GPU-accelerated medical data real-time visualization and exploration, as well as high-performance computation. It is a great choice. I highly recommend it."
- Qi Zhang, Researcher, National Research Council Institute for Biodiagnostics, Canada
"I wanted to thank everyone at Colfax for their outstanding work in supplying hardware solutions to NASA Ames Research Center for our joint USAF/NASA project. Everyone from the sales team to manufacturing and delivery of our PC based systems have been great to work with; each has been very professional, very responsive, very competitive, and technically competent. The sales people are extremely knowledgeable of high end PC based systems with advanced GPU solutions; Colfax has delivered PC based solutions that have been built to our specific configuration needs (rack mounted solutions in some cases, and desktop solutions in others). I could not be happier with Colfax International; they are a highly recommended source for any PC based system!"
- John Archdeacon, NASA Ames Research Center
"We have been using Colfax workstations for all geo-computing, statistical modeling and visualization in our lab since 2000. Our most recent Tesla workstation from Colfax continues the trend of exceeding our performance expectations at the best prices available. Colfax's flexibility in system design and tech support is beyond compare- we work directly with expert system builders to get precisely what we want- including custom hardware configurations and multiple operating systems. We are now working very hard to make full use of all of the horsepower in this system - this workstation is just over the top in terms of resources!"
- Erle C. Ellis, Associate Professor, Geography & Environmental Systems,
University of Maryland
"At NVIDIA's first appointed CUDA Center of Excellence, we are continually working to push the limits with a variety of bleeding edge computing hardware. Colfax has gone the extra mile for us on multiple fronts, including facilitating early access to hardware, extensive pre-delivery testing, and expressing genuine interest and effort in addressing some unique goals of ours as a customer."
- Jeremy Enos, System Engineer, The National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois
"A great deal of current research in Machine Learning and AI is focused on large-scale learning systems applied to difficult problems in computer vision and robotics. In the Stanford AI Lab, we have recently used GPU computing solutions built by Colfax International to help tackle large problems in these areas. With our cluster of 18 machines housing 36 nVidia GPUs, we are able to run very large experiments and have seen performance improvements of up to 90x in some tasks. These systems have played an important part in many recent state-of-the-art research results achieved by our lab and continue to serve as integral tools in our experiments and day-to-day development."
- Professor Andrew Y. Ng, Stanford University
"We have purchased a number of computer systems from Colfax over the years, starting with 2005. The two things that are most attractive about Colfax machines are performance and price. Colfax offers custom systems with hardware parameters which the major competitors either cannot match or can only match for 2-3 times the price of a comparable Colfax system.
Technical support is another thing that is very important, while one does not expect to have problems; the facts of life are that some computers will experience trouble, regardless of the manufacturer. Colfax technical support provides prompt, friendly and professional service in the event of hardware failure or issues with the operating system. Lastly, we have obtained computational results with Colfax systems which would probably have been impossible to achieve with another computational environment."
- V.G. Zakrzewski, Associate Research Professor, Department of Chemistry/Biochemistry, Auburn University
"We are using very large scale high performance computer simulations of lattice gauge theories to study the basic physics of the Large Hadron Collider. This requires GPU computing. With the help from Colfax we recently installed our new GPU cluster funded by a DOE ARRA award. The cluster deploys 48 Tesla C2050 cards in twelve worker nodes with a head node running GTX 580 cards. We have been impressed with Colfax International providing great help and timely assembly, testing, and highly professional delivery to our research group. Their attention to details, the technical advice, and competitive pricing was exemplary in the process. We are very pleased with the way Colfax is conducting business in high performance computing and they remain our preferred partner for high performance computational equipment."
- Julius Kuti, Distinguished Professor of Physics, Department of Physics, University of California, San Diego
"We purchased a custom machine with 2 six-core Xeon processors and 4 C2050 Tesla GPUs for image processing applications. The machine arrived fully loaded with Ubuntu and was ready to plug in and start using. We were able to use the machine immediately and have been very pleased with the performance. After over a month of intensive processing there have been no problems. We definitely recommend Colfax for scientists that need reliable state-of-the-art hardware."
- John Valenzuela, Ph.D., Michigan Technological University
"Recommend Colfax highly for their no-nonsense approach to sales, pricing, and execution. Colfax was ready to help us as much or as little as we needed every step of the way in building our compute cluster -- from specifying individual nodes up to assembling them into racks with power distribution units. For only a small difference in cost compared to trying to specify, order, and assemble everything ourselves; we got expert advice on the latest systems, configurations, and received fully-tested and operational computers. They asked just the right questions about power, cooling, and performance to be sure we got the job done right."
- Michael Bajura, University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute
"In the past 15 months, we have purchased 4 NVIDIA Tesla C1060 cards, 9 NVIDIA Tesla C2050 cards, and 7 NVIDIA Tesla C2070 cards from Colfax. Colfax was not only very competitive on price, but also very quick to answer pre-sales questions, and expedient to ship the orders. It is a great pleasure to deal with sales staff who understand the products that they are selling. We are planning to use Colfax again in the future."
- Dr. Miroslav N. Velev, President of Aries Design Automation, Chicago, IL
"I used AMBER molecular dynamics program to run a 10-base pair DNA with a new copper-based anticancer drug. A 10nano second simulation was run in 2.6 hours. At my University cluster, the same simulation took 6.7 hours using 128 INTEL 2.6GHz procs. Its amazing how fast it was!" (Tesla Bio-Workbench - GPU test drive program on a Colfax PSC)
- Rodrigo Galindo, Depto de Fisicoquimica, Instituto de Química, UNAM
"Colfax International sells great computers at great prices and with excellent customer service. I've purchased 11 different machines from Colfax International, in some cases while representing my lab and in one case while representing myself. Colfax International has always delivered quality computers that make it possible to run experiments that used to take weeks in only one or two days. Moreover, they do this at prices that would be difficult to beat even if I were building the machines myself. Colfax International has always worked tirelessly to make sure that all options are customized to fit my needs precisely, from proposing improvements to my specifications for machines to working out special shipping arrangements for me."
- Ian Goodfellow, M.Sc., Computer Science, Stanford University
"Our research on EEG-based brain-computer interfaces relies heavily on GPU-assisted computation. We are very pleased with the recently-arrived CXT4000, which was competitively priced and clearly built with care to a high standard of quality. The speed of this workstation, with one GTX480 and two C2050s, is outstanding; it lets us use in real time new classes of algorithm for research with high-density EEG. The support of the Colfax International staff with sales and configuration details was excellent, and I look forward to purchasing further computers from them."
- Michael D'Zmura, PH.D., Professor of Cognitive Sciences, University of California, Irvine
"I have been impressed with the level of customer service provided to me by the Colfax staff. I called twice with issues and the staff resolved them with the highest level of urgency and professionalism. I would certainly recommend Colfax to other individuals in the academic research computing community."
- Aaron P. Wemhoff, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Villanova University
“I have purchased two Colfax CXT2000i PSCs for simulation of communication systems with special emphasis on sparse sampling techniques, power amplifier linearization, and development of radio frequency simulation techniques. With 1 display driving GPU and 2 computational GPUs, this is a quiet yet powerful GPU based solution. The CXT2000i is rock-solid, fast, and all the components are top of the line. It is absolutely the best computer for its purpose and has given me the computing power I required to take my work to a whole new level.”
- Torben Larsen, Professor, Department of Electronic Systems, Aalborg University, Denmark
"The International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) bought nine Tesla-based compute servers for our research in speech and signal processing, and in particular our work on algorithms for robust speech recognition. We are working on porting our applications to the new architecture and it promises to be an extremely cost effective platform for our most computationally-intensive algorithms.
Colfax was very competitive on price for the systems we specified, but also provided very efficient service both pre- and post-sales. It's a pleasure to deal with sales staff who understand the products that they are selling and respond quickly to requests for further information. The systems were supplied exactly as specified and everything worked perfectly. Finally, when we did have some questions on Linux compatibility issues, it was refreshing be able to cut through to qualified technical support without having to go through the usual layers of staff who know little more than how to query a database. Thanks to the quality of both their products and service, Colfax International now joins Dell and Sun on our list of preferred server suppliers."
- David Johnson, International Computer Science Institute
"The electromagnetic geophysics group at Oregon State University has adopted the CUDA HPC paradigm, in our case using f90/f95 CUDA support through PGI compilers. We solve large-scale geophysical inverse problems, carrying out 3D imaging of the electrical properties of the Earth's subsurface (e.g. see www.OpenEM.org). The task is computationally demanding, requiring both massive parallelism and high memory bandwidth and capacity.
After a careful survey of possible suppliers, we selected Colfax International to carry out a custom build. Mid-stream in our purchasing process, Colfax made us aware of the soon-to-be-released CXT8000 4U rackmount server. This is the deal platform for us, and we worked with Colfax to assure early delivery of an 8-core Nehalem + 4 Tesla system for our initial testing. The build quality was excellent. Our HPC support staff was very impressed with the quality of all components used, even including the quality of power cords and the impressive cooling system design. Colfax also worked to source a third-party NAS server to our specifications, and delivered a tightly bundled compute/disk server configuration. They have been pro-active in working with us to support firmware upgrades, as required, so support has not ended with delivery of the system.
We plan to use this testbed with the Fermi architecture, which gives us the potential to configure 4U size 8 x Fermi systems and CXT8000 clusters, and look forward to continuing our relationship with Colfax as we expand our CUDA HPC enterprise."
- Prof. Adam Schultz, Ph.D., College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University
"We recently purchased a PSC from Colfax for development and applications of biomolecular dynamics simulations. With 4 NVIDIA Tesla cards, this machine has given over 1000% performance boost as compared to a dual-core system."
- Pratul K. Agarwal, Ph.D., Computational Biology Institute & Computer Science and Mathematics Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
"The mapping from customer needs to a given computer solution is far from easy – not least when high performance computing is considered. Colfax has an enormous overview of different hardware and software possibilities, and they are capable of combining different components within the customers budget to present excellent proposals.
I must say that I am deeply impressed with Colfax. This is all the way from the very first contact where they take any question seriously, via the configuration and design phase all the way to engineering and shipping. Colfax went above and beyond the call of duty to do a stress test on a weekend to find the possibilities for using more graphics processing units than initially asked for. I have since then experienced that this is typical Colfax behavior. It is obvious that Colfax really take pride in what they do – and they do it in an impressive way.
When I received the parcels from Fedex I was highly surprised. Never, and I do mean never, have I seen such a careful packing of the equipment and of course everything was up and running immediately. All in all I am deeply impressed with the way Colfax is doing its business and they are from now on my preferred partner for computational equipment."
- Torben Larsen, Professor, Department of Electronic Systems, Aalborg University, Denmark
"Provisioning scientific compute and storage infrastructure for contemporary bioinformatics and computational biology research is challenging. I want to thank Colfax and your excellent staff for the outstanding value, quality, and service that you provided the Center for Genomic Sciences (CGS) recently when we retained your firm to build our new multi-socket/multi-core servers and direct-attached storage (DAS) systems."
- Robert Boissy, Ph.D., Assistant Professor and Director of Bioinformatics, Center for Genomic Sciences (CGS), West Penn Allegheny Health System
"I continue to be impressed with the high level of customer service and system performance at Colfax. Colfax is at the leading edge of GPU high-performance computing. We are looking forward to deepening our partnership."
- Sven Prevrhal, Ph.D., Research Scientist, Philips Medical Systems
"The CXT5000 worked superbly out of the box and we have been utilizing its GPU power to crunch high fidelity simulations and advanced image processing algorithms ever since. An examination inside the system showed professionally installed high quality components. The Colfax team has done an exceptional job designing and building the CXT5000 personal super computer."
- Pacific Defense Solutions, LLC
"I’m just writing to say thanks for Colfax's responsive support team, who went above and beyond the call of duty in helping us to set up a GPU-accelerated system in our lab. We perform simulations with a high computational load. During our integration of our code with the Tesla system, we managed to inadvertently fry the non-Tesla GPU. Colfax’s support team were helpful and patient over the phone while troubleshooting the problem we were having. Colfax quickly and systematically determined the cause of the problem despite our limited ability to probe—or for that matter, clearly describe—the new system. We were able to resume simulations the next day thanks to the speedy replacement of the faulty GPU. It is encouraging to know that when an unforeseen problem like this arises, we can count on Colfax to help us sort it out!
We have now given the system its first real trial of our full computational requirements. The time required to run our model has improved by a factor of 40 over our previous system, and the GPUs provide the bulk of that acceleration. This profoundly changes the types of approach we can now seriously consider, as computational tasks that used to take us days can now be solved over lunch.
Thanks very much for providing such an excellent product, and also for providing such excellent support for it. We’re delighted with our lab’s new purchase."
- Matthew Frerking, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Behavioral Neuroscience, Oregon Health & Science University
"Colfax International supplied us with a Tesla based Personal Supercomputer that met our current graphics and parallel computing requirements entirely. The solution from Colfax was the most cost-effective among all vendors we contacted, and their after-sales support was prompt and excellent.
Their expertise in Fedora Core based systems is definitely something that helped us deploy this supercomputer for our students in short order. At Lock Haven University, our vision is to build an open-standards based curriculum in 3D animation and Graphics, and the solution Colfax International provided with their NVIDIA/Fedora Core platform puts this goal within reach. With their support, we were able to integrate the supercomputer into our existing linux environment with minimal issues."
- Krish Pillai, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Lock Haven University
"We develop systems for medical imaging, which usually require the ability of processing large amounts of numerical data fast. As a graduate student, I often get to write code. I can state without reservation that the NVIDIA GPU system Colfax International built for us was very easy to program and to run code on. Seeing a 50x or greater speedup with respect to what we were used to just a few months ago has become the routine in my research group!"
- Luca Caucci, College of Optical Sciences, University of Arizona
“Simulating the mechanisms embedded in biological neural circuitry requires an enormous amount of parallel compute power, and we required a very high-performance system. Thanks to the highly professional design, installation and support services delivered by Colfax, we were able to seamlessly migrate to the new system.”
- Paul A. Rhodes, Ph.D., CEO of Evolved Machines