Manifold sets new GIS record

Manifold.net has announced a new world record for the number of processors used in a personal computer for Geographic Information Systems (GIS) processing. At the company's 2009 European User Meeting in London, Manifold demonstrated an upcoming new software product that simultaneously utilised over 1440 processor cores to perform a remote sensing image computation at supercomputer speed with over 3.5 teraflops of performance. Manifold demonstrated the new software on a desktop 64-bit Windows PC equipped with three NVIDIA GTX 295 GPU cards costing less than $500 each.

The demonstration showed how a desktop Windows PC using inexpensive consumer components and running a $245 Manifold GIS package can run over one hundred times faster than any other GIS or remote sensing software package, even those costing tens of thousands of dollars more than Manifold.

"Modern technology provides significantly lower cost as well as much greater performance," commented Dimitri Rotow, a product manager at Manifold. He continued, "The desktop supercomputer technology we utilise costs almost nothing to deploy, as little as $80 to start, yet it far outperforms any competitor's software, even packages costing 50 times as much. By using inexpensive, massively parallel GPUs Manifold can provide teraflops of computing performance for only a few hundred dollars."

NVIDIA GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) employ multiple parallel processing units for faster performance. Manifold's new software uses massively parallelised programming to execute general purpose computations within those parallel processing units for much faster performance than possible on the main CPU. Because of NVIDIA's success in consumer graphics markets, over 100 million NVIDIA GPUs have already been installed in computers throughout the world, ready to provide supercomputer speed to anyone using Manifold's new product. NVIDIA GPU cards are widely sold by many vendors for as little as $80 per card.

This new Manifold technology will ship in Q2, 2009, and will be offered to Manifold Release 8 licensees for an update fee between $50 and $100.