“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