By using NVIDIA’s Tesla, Dell is looking at providing computer to niche computing markers like oil exploration, financial computing, molecular dynamics and many others. Tesla is based on the same GPU design than the recent GeForce GPUs but is sold as a non-graphics accelerator. By using the hundreds of processing units (that usually compute colors and pixels) to process non graphical data, companies can achieve supercomputer-performance at a fraction of the price and in a much smaller footprint and energy requirements.
Of course, Tesla doesn’t come for cheap, but in industries like oil and gas, the price to pay for computers is negligible they can get to these natural resources faster. It is similar for the financial community. A very small improvement (0.5%) in the accuracy of the computations can yield hundreds of millions of dollars in gains. You can also build your own Tesla computer