Nvidia today it calls the Telsa Personal Supercomputer at the annual Supercomputing 08 show here. The Tesla sports 960 cores, almost 4 teraflops of performance and costs less than $9,995. It achieves that speed and price by using four graphics processing units (GPUs), each of which has 240 cores.

"This really is the supercomputer on your desk," told attendees at the conference, which drew more than 10,000 science and commercial high performance computing users, along with a slew of vendors hoping that the high performance computing (HPC) market will be a bright spot in otherwise difficult tech economy. The attendance was a new record for this annual conference.

The development of HPC systems that rely on GPU processors has advanced, in part, because of the billions of dollars being used to develop systems for gamers. The contribution gaming has made to HPC development wasn't lost on those at this conference.

"That's the beauty of it," said Ian Watson, a chemist who uses high-performance systems for a pharmaceutical company he didn't want named. "The gamers of the world are paying for the development of that stuff. If we can hitch ourselves to that train as it thunders past, that's very attractive."

Dell has produced a workstation in its Precision line that uses the Nvidia GPU chip, and a number of other makers are producing systems based on Nvidia's parallel computing architecture.