Nvidia, the US computer company that makes graphics cards has taken a giant leap forward in computing when it unveiled the world's first personal super computer named,'Tesla Personal Supercomputer', which is 250 times faster than standard PCs.

The Tesla Personal Supercomputer, which was unveiled in Britain last week, was first launched in the US last month and is the same size as the home PC compared to the huge combination of many computers that make up a super computer taking up a huge amount of space and costing millions of dollars in production and maintenance.

Work that usually take weeks by a average PC, will now be done in just a few hours in this new personal super computer as the GPUs used in the Tesla Personal Supercomputer is 3 or 4 Tesla C1060 computing processors with 4GB of dedicated memory per GPU. It offers the performance of a cluster in a desktop system, delivering close to 4 teraflops of performance.

Tesla personal supercomputers costing between $5,900 and Rs11,800 will be a boon to doctors who will be able to process results for brain and body scans within hours instead of the days taken on a regular PC.

With high computing speed, it will also help scientists to run hundreds of thousands of simulations in order to shortlist drugs that may likely be a cure to diseases such as cancer and malaria.

Speaking at the launch, David Kirk, the chief scientist at NVIDIA said ''Pretty much anything that you do on your PC that takes a lot of time can be accelerated with this. These supercomputers can improve the time it takes to process info by 1,000 times. If you imagine it takes a week to get a result (from running an experiment), you can only do it 52 times a year. If it takes you minutes, you can do it constantly, and learn just as much in a day.''

While the normal PC handles one task at a time in a linear style, the Tesla personal supercomputers can work on tasks simultaneously to do things like colour pixels together on screens to present moving images.

Downloading a film onto an iPod, a graphics card on the Tesla personal supercomputer will take about twenty minutes, whereas the normal PC will take up to six hours to download.

Initially these computers will be sold to the scientific and research community and universities and PC maker Dell, will later bring it to the consumer market by mass producing it.

In India, Tesla Personal Supercomputer is sold in two models and has a price tag of Rs479,500 and Rs258,500 respectively.