[Kal-EL]

nVidia CEO Talks Parallel and Shows Roadmap at GTC 2010
9/22/2010 by: John Oram - Get more from this author





On Tuesday at GPU Technology Conference 2010 nVidia CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang spoke about the success of GPUs [graphics processing units], the developer momentum behind CUDA, and the importance of Parallel Computing to a broad cross-section of the industry. At the end he showed one of those rare nVidia roadmaps of upcoming products.

The morning started with 3D glasses and a series of high-impact videos. Then Jen-Hsun launched into a nearly non-stop hour and half outline of nVidia's successes. He clearly is enthusiastic about the CUDA [Compute Unified Device Architecture], nVidia's programming language for general-purpose GPU computing. He said "we recognize we don't want to replace the CPU, we want to add performance on it using GPUs."

Jen-Hsun then talked about his definition of visual computing and explained how many organizations are using power of the GPU to tackle difficult parallel computing problems. There were more 3D videos focused around upcoming games. Tony Tamasi, nVidia's senior VP of content and technology, showed off demos that are well beyond what today's games are doing. The processing power of the green GPGPU with CUDA has really raised the bar for the red graphics card supporters - and it is great that we have two companies that go the distance to increase the performance and impress the market.

Next up was Dr. Subbiah, VP of Global Business Development at ANSYS, talking about their latest design simulation application, Mechanical R13. ANSYS is using the latest nVidia Tesla GPUs in conjunction with a quad-core processor. The combination can cut overall turnaround time in half on typical workloads, when compared to running solely on the quad-core processor.

We were introduced to how seriously nVidia is focused on the unique needs of engineers and scientists who are developing products or conducting research.

Jen-Hsun then talked about scientific computation application Matlab, a numerical computing environment and programming language developed by MathWorks. Their Release R2010b just announced will support CUDA-accelerated GPUs and make GPU computing instantaneously available to a million users doing important work around the world. In 12 months, Matlab went from being accelerated through JACKET library by AccelerEyes to native support inside the app.

A particularly compelling example was the conversation about real-time heart surgery with Michael Black, MD. That one will be covered in another article.


BSN

[Rogue210]

Wow...that is alot to take in....