Constructing a Mobility and Acceleration Computing Platform with NVIDIA Jetson TK1

Current high-end graphics processing units (GPUs), which contain up to thousand cores per-chip, are widely used in the high performance computing community. However, in the past, the cost and power consumption of constructing a high performance platform with graphics cards, such as Tesla and Fermi series, are high. Moreover, these graphics cards all installed in personal computers or servers, and then the immediate and mobility requirements can not be provided by this platform. NVIDIA Jetson TK1 (Tegra K1) is a full-featured platform for embedded applications and it contains 192 CUDA Cores (Kepler GPU). Due to its low cost, low power consumption and high applicability, NVIDIA Jetson TK1 has become a new research direction. In this paper, we construct a mobility and acceleration computing platform with NVIDIA Jetson TK1. Besides, two tools, ClustalWtk and MCCtk are designed based on NVIDIA Jetson TK1. These tools both can achieve 3 and 4 times speedup ratios on single NVIDIA Jetson TK1 by comparing with their CPU versions on Intel XEON E5-2650 CPU and ARM Cortex-A15 CPU, respectively. Moreover, the cost-performance ratio by NVIDIA Jetson TK1 is higher than that by NVIDIA Tesla K20m. In addition, the user friendly interfaces are also provided by these two tools, respectively.