Elsa Japan, a supplier of various graphics solution, has unveiled the world’s first multi-GPU setup powered by Hydra technology by LucidLogix, a startup supported by Intel Capital. The solution powered by four graphics processing units is aimed at broadcast, medical and other markets that require high-performance real time graphics processing or GPGPU-based high-performance computing.

“Partnership with Lucid is very important for our customers who require high performance computer. We can provide scalable performance and configurable solutions to break through the performance barrier.” said Jun Nagai, president of Elsa Japan.

The first ultra high end professional graphics accelerator based on Lucid Hydra will be able to support up to four Nvidia GeForce or Quadro graphics cards as Elsa Japan exclusively sells only Nvidia-based solutions. The product is not aimed at gamers and will be supplied in 2U rack mount case.

Mainboard featuring Lucid Hydra multi-GPU core-logic

Elsa’s Hydra-based visualization solution will begin shipping in late March, 2009, the company indicated without disclosing any details regarding pricing or performance of the device.

“We are pleased to partner with Elsa, which has the reputation for providing leading performance computing solutions to the Japanese market. Elsa’s selection of Lucid products for graphics and high performance computing platforms demonstrates our commitment to deliver a unique and powerful parallel processing architecture. Hydra technology will allow ELSA to combine multiple GPUs on one device, for efficient, high performance in compute intensive, large scale visualization scenarios,” said Offir Remez, president of Lucid.

Mainboard featuring Lucid Hydra multi-GPU core-logic with cards

The Hydra engine sits between the chipset and several GPUs and acts like a dispatch processor within a graphics processing unit (GPU) to distribute tasks among the chips. The technology drives the GPUs, performing scalable rendering of a particular image or scene, and relies on “unique adaptive decomposition and acceleration algorithms to overcome bottlenecks”. The Hydra engine combines a PCI Express 1.1. system-on-chip (Tensilica Diamond 212GP programmable general purpose processor) with exclusive software technologies that load-balances graphics processing tasks, delivering near-linear to above-linear performance with two, three or more graphics cards, according to the company’s promises.

Originally Lucid said that the first commercial Hydra-based applications will be available in Q4 2008, but it looks like the first visualization solution will only hit the market in Q2 2009.

Tags: Elsa, Lucid, Geforce, Quadro, Nvidia, Hydra, ATI, Radeon, Larrabee, Intel