Nvidia titan v fails in scientific simulations

The NVIDIA TITAN V based on the Volta core was designed for the field of medicine and artificial intelligence, before a graphics card for video games, but it seems that this objective is not being met as planned.

NVIDIA TITAN V is useless to scientists

The graphics card for the professional sector is causing some problems in scientific simulation, more than anything in the medical sector. Based on the latest Volta architecture, the TITAN V is the largest GPU ever made by NVIDIA, measuring 815mm² and 21.1bn transistors.

According to an engineer who has spoken to The Register , TITAN V is unable to produce reliable results under specific conditions. The card is said to be suffering from an error that is causing it to produce different results while repeatedly executing the same calculations.

One of the examples mentioned is when identical simulations of an interaction between a protein and an enzyme are run. These calculations are supposed to produce identical results each time. However, two out of four TITAN V cards, which the engineer had tested, would throw errors when running the same simulation.

Problem believed to be due to a defect in memory layout

This problem is believed to be due to a memory design flaw. According to an industry veteran who has spoken to The Register , NVIDIA may be pushing TITAN V hardware to its limits, or even beyond limits. Unlike graphics cards suitable for workstations such as AMD's Quadro line or Radeon Pro, NVIDIA has disabled memory error correction on this card.

With this scenario, the Volta-based TITAN card would be totally useless to scientists.

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