nTersect

UsefulProgress and NVIDIA GPUs Generating 3D Medical Images

Posted: 17 May 2010 05:19 PM PDT

Periodically, we're using this blog to profile some of the companies that participated in NVIDIA's Emerging Companies Summit. You can learn more about innovative companies that use NVIDIA's GPU technology in the GPU Ventures Zone. Check out information on the up

We've written before about how GPUs are transforming the field of medical imaging. In the case of Paris-based startup UsefulProgress, GPUs are enabling a kind of real-life X-ray vision. From a single scan, UsefulProgress technology can produce a high-definition 3D digital anatomy that reveals the underlying layers of bones, vessels, tissues and muscles in a body.

The imagery that the UsefulProgress technology produces is stunning. You don't have to be a medical student to appreciate a detailed 3D fly-through of the human brain or skeletal system (see the UsefulProgress website for examples). Surgeons can use UsefulProgress's images as a pre-operative dry run, while doctors can employ them for non-invasive diagnostics. Students at the University of Paris Descartes medical school use the technology to study the human body and learn surgical techniques.

At the Emerging Companies Summit, the head of UsefulProgress, Sylvain Ordureau, met with NVIDIA Vice President of Business Development Jeff Herbst to talk about the technology. The proprietary software-hardware solution works with medical imaging technology such as CT, MRI and X-ray. The UsefulProgress solution takes the hundreds of image "slices" produced from such scans and stitches them together into a 3D volume. NVIDIA GPUs and CUDA are used for the image processing as well as the image display. The high resolution (8000x8000 pixels) of the images and large file sizes make this the sort of computational problem ideally suited to parallel processing.

Doctors aren't the only ones who want a way to peer inside the human body without performing surgery. Archaeologists who work with human mummies have the same need – in many cases their subjects are too fragile to withstand an autopsy. For instance, after scanning an enigmatic mummy at Paris's Musée de l'Homme, the UsefulProgress technology can create the 3D images within seconds, allowing archaeologists to peer inside the skull cavity of the thousand-year-old subject, discovering clues to its origin and history.

Although medical imaging is its primary use case, UsefulProgress is finding other applications for its 3D volume rendering, including materials scanning, pharmaceutical research and even helping gemologists get a glimpse inside precious stones like diamonds before the stones are cut.

GPU Advancements in Options Analytics

Posted: 17 May 2010 12:02 PM PDT

GPU usage in the financial industry continues to grow. Previously on this blog we told you about Aqumin, a company that takes complex financial information and makes it actionable by using GPUs for analytics as well as data visualization Now we wanted to share an update about Hanweck Associates' product, Volera, which uses parallel computing to tackle the fast-moving world of options analytics.

Financial analysts are constantly flooded with "messages" or options trade and quote data. Literally millions of messages are transmitted every single second, an overwhelming amount of data. Analysts and traders are expected to analyze these messages and make fast and smart investment decisions. Using computers to analyze this data is the only way to go, but the serial method of computation used by traditional CPU-based computers is simply not capable of efficiently handling this amount of information. Only by tackling the data in parallel, can financial analysts get timely information. Volera does just that.

The product first launched in 2007 and back then Volera was able to price the entire US options market in real-time using just 12 GPUs as opposed to 60 1U servers equipped with CPUs. With the massively parallel CUDA architecture of NVIDIA's latest GPUs, Volera performs options calculations faster than ever before. Even though message rates in the US options market have tripled since 2007, Volera today achieves the same performance with just 8 Fermi-class Tesla GPUs.

In a recent interview with the analyst firm TABB Group, Jerry Hanweck, founder and principal partner of Hanweck Associates had this to say about GPUs in finance: