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- GPU Technology Conference: What They're Saying (Day 2)
- GPU Technology Conference – Day 2 Video Recap
- GPUs Help Scientists Track Changes in the Sun
- GPU Technology Helping Walt Disney Animation Studios Refine Early Stage Animation Efforts
- CUDA Libraries Take Center Stage Day Two at the GPU Technology Conference
- The Foundry Talks Developing VFX for Film and Video on GPUs
- GTC Attendees Check Out Exhibition Floor Flush With Showstoppers
- Conducting Virtual Surgery with BioDigital Systems and 3D Vision
- Emerging Companies Provide Insight and Inspiration for the GPU Community
| GPU Technology Conference: What They're Saying (Day 2) Posted: 22 Sep 2010 09:00 PM PDT Day two at the GPU Technology Conference is complete and we've published a bevy of blog posts, Tweets, and Facebook status updates chronicling the show. Attendees have also been busy writing and tweeting about their experiences -- take a look at what some of them had to say:
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| GPU Technology Conference – Day 2 Video Recap Posted: 22 Sep 2010 07:25 PM PDT Renowned computational biologist Klaus Schulten kicked off GTC's second day with a keynote focused on his team's pioneering work with the computational microscope. The Emerging Companies Summit came on his heels, as did presentations by The Foundry, Walt Disney Animation Studios and Harvard luminary Hanspeter Pfister. In the video below, Rob Csongor, VP of corporate marketing, describes the day's excitement live from the show floor.
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| GPUs Help Scientists Track Changes in the Sun Posted: 22 Sep 2010 06:55 PM PDT The sun – which most of us take for granted – is a "living astrophysical object" with a tumultuous life of its own. Its mysterious flares and filaments and the forces that govern its magnetic fields are the focus of research for NASA's newly formed Solar Dynamics Observatory and the subject of an afternoon Wednesday GPU Technology Conference session, "Using GPUs to Track Changes in the Sun."
Astrophysicist Mark Cheung and software engineer Ralph Seguin, both of Lockheed Martin Solar & Astrophysics Laboratory, presented some of the latest research into solar dynamics. While brilliant simulations of sun spots and colorized movies of solar events played behind them, Cheung and Seguin discussed the ways that GPUs are accelerating the computationally intensive work in this field, including:
Summarizing the work of Brian Harker-Lundberg of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, Ariz., Cheung explained how GPUs have resulted in acceleration of roughly 30x in work that measures the sun's magnetic field. Seguin, who displayed a "virtual tour of the sun," told of how GPUs help process the massive amounts of data received at the Lockheed Martin lab – roughly 6TB a day. And in one of the session highlights, Seguin treated session members to film of a dramatic solar filament that formed on the surface of the sun in the wee hours of the morning today. Study of the sun has very real implications for everyday life here on Earth. Solar events can kill satellites and affect air travel. In 1989, 6 million people lost power for a couple weeks when a coronal mass ejection – or solar storm – took out a power grid, disrupting power across Quebec. Right now, the science is focused on measuring and attempting to understand solar weather – we're not yet at the point of making solar weather predictions, but that's definitely a future goal of the science. Even though it was one of the final sessions of the day, about half the audience stayed behind for extended discussion and Q&A – and to keep watching the astounding movies of the sun playing onscreen. |
| GPU Technology Helping Walt Disney Animation Studios Refine Early Stage Animation Efforts Posted: 22 Sep 2010 06:28 PM PDT With all the examples of NVIDIA's GPU technology enabling a range of 3D video applications, it's no surprise that Walt Disney Animation Studios is finding that GPU-powered computing is bringing new efficiencies to the art of 3D computer-generated animation. During a presentation Wednesday at the GPU Technology Conference, David Adler, principal software engineer for Disney Animation, said GPUs are bringing some important incremental benefits to the rendering process. For instance, rather than the fake shadows the studio's old process yielded, the injection of GPUs has enabled early renderings of animation sequences to show shadowing consistent with what a powerful program such as Renderman yields. It also helps the studio establish consistent lighting during these early stages, providing the animation team with a clearer picture of where light and dark areas of the picture will be. "(The addition of GPUs) lets us make the big decisions early, when it's less expensive to make a change," Adler said. This despite the fact that Disney has only scratched the surface of what its GPU-powered environment can do, hence it has plans for future enhancements. Some examples of what Adler would like do: he'd like to refine prototype workflow capabilities so the system can be used on feature-length pictures; improve cache management; and enable more image-based lighting. Adler also knows the studio can't depend solely on GPU technology, which is why he'd also like to perform some CPU-side optimizations. |
| CUDA Libraries Take Center Stage Day Two at the GPU Technology Conference Posted: 22 Sep 2010 04:49 PM PDT Day two of the GPU Technology Conference featured a host of new CUDA-centric sessions, covering a range of topics. And, while yesterday's theme seemed to be medical, today libraries reign supreme. Parallel computing through libraries is a great way to leverage GPU computing performance. Not only can domain specific libraries be specialized to provide APIs to users familiar with a particular field, but exploit particular algorithmic properties to optimize the parallel performance. In a similar way, domain specific languages can play the same tricks at the language level. Here are several of the sessions that provided great examples of libraries and domain specific languages tuned for GPU computing:
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| The Foundry Talks Developing VFX for Film and Video on GPUs Posted: 22 Sep 2010 04:05 PM PDT In the visual effects world, London-based award-winning firm The Foundry is renowned for its software. Bruno Nicoletti, founder and CTO of The Foundry, speed-talked through a tour of the company's tools and software, demonstrating to an audience with a healthy population of VFX artists and developers how GPUs are changing the industry in "Developing GPU-Enabled Visual Effects for Film and Video."
Foundry technology has been used in a host of blockbusters, such as Avatar, Harry Potter, The Dark Knight and many, many others, and its Nuke compositing software has been used for everything from the fantastic (CGI castles) to the mundane (complexion correction). As a leader in the industry, Nicoletti has an invaluable perspective on the changes that GPUs are making in VFX. GPUs are reducing rendering times and allowing VFX to be involved more pervasively in all stages of production, in effect blurring the line between post production and production. The popularity of utilizing the power of GPUs in the visual effects (VFX) industry continues to gain momentum. Major film production studios that historically have been CPU-based for VFX are not only utilizing GPUs, they are starting to replace their CPU-based rendering systems with GPU-based one. This transition to GPU in VFX, however, requires some legwork, particularly when it comes to the complex image processing algorithms in VFX software. This (along with The Foundry's solution) was the subject of the second half of Nicoletti's talk. With hundreds of effects and millions of lines of code in its software, The Foundry was faced with having to rewrite everything to exploit GPUs while maintaining separate algorithms for CPUs. Faced with the prospect of writing and debugging two sets of complex algorithms, The Foundry created something they're calling Blink (although Nicoletti used its internal code name of RIP, or "Righteous Image Processing"). Blink wraps image processing up into a high level C++ API. It lets programmers run kernels on the CPU for debugging, and then those kernels can be translated to spit out GPU CUDA. Nicoletti showed several coding examples and wrapped by showing examples of a motion estimation function run on an Intel Xeon 5504 versus an NVIDIA Quadro 5000. The speed difference was extraordinary (from 5fps to more than 200fps), which augurs for increased demand for VFX on GPU – and Blink. |
| GTC Attendees Check Out Exhibition Floor Flush With Showstoppers Posted: 22 Sep 2010 02:44 PM PDT Everywhere one looks on the exhibit floor at the GPU Technology Conference, people are astounded at the way GPUs are being put to work. From powering 3D video and audio to providing the kinds of computing gains normally associated with virtualization, attendees are finding a world of new GPGPU applications, and vendors are enjoying the oohs and ahs.
Rie Matsubara, a software engineer for Stereo 3D, which converts 2D video into 3D stereo video, found herself drawn to an eye-catching dome in the corner of the exhibition hall in which attendees could manipulate a molecular dynamics demo. It harkened Matsubara back to her 10 years working in the planetarium industry.
Meanwhile, Jan Burianek found a demo of VisiSonics' 3D sound capture and delivery system compelling, and was brainstorming ways to put it to use. VisiSonics' system delivers 5 video streams and 64 audio streams from its proprietary camera, directly to the GPU, which made the setup possible.
Burianek, 3D specialist for AV Media, which creates presentations and audio-visual displays for clients in the Czech Republic, says VisiSonics' breakthrough technology, which allows sound to be captured, mapped to its location, and then delivered to wherever is desired, could be used not only to add pizzazz to presentations, but might help the company bring more visitors to a client that runs a string of edutainment-oriented IQ parks languishing throughout the country. "When you have something like this, you always attract people," says Burianek. He added that the advances he's seeing at this year's show are magnitudes of order more advanced than what he saw last year, portending incredible advances in the coming years. Amid all the flashy video and audio displays, there were also vendors busy demoing straightforward technology solutions. AMAX Information Technologies, for instance, was encountering a lot of interest in its custom-built GPU systems, which it sells largely to OEMs. Huy Pham, an AMAX account manager, said many university researchers were inquiring about the ability of GPUs to do the work of many servers and workstations. "They're very interested in how GPUs can help their applications," he said. Based on Burianek's assessment, if they like what they're seeing now, just wait until next year. |
| Conducting Virtual Surgery with BioDigital Systems and 3D Vision Posted: 22 Sep 2010 01:18 PM PDT GPU technology is transforming medical imaging and surgical education by enabling doctors and medical students to see inside the human body and train for complex procedures on virtual surgery simulators. That was the takeaway from the "Virtual Surgery" presentation by Aaron Oliker of BioDigital Systems and New York University. Communicating complex surgical instructions was the idea behind one of BioDigital's first simulations, a 3D animation on how to correct cleft palates. This common birth defect affects 1 in 600 children and is prevalent in the developing world. The problem is, not enough local doctors know how to perform the life-changing surgery. Oliker helped create the first surgical animation of a cleft procedure – an animation that is now on DVDs and has been distributed to thousands of surgeons, through the nonprofit organization SmileTrain. "The surgery is a geometric puzzle," said Oliker, and a key to understanding it is to see it unfold in 3D. To create its simulations, BioDigital gathers data from CT scans. One example Oliker showed – of a wrist moving through its range of motions – was easily 30 to 40 million polygons. GPUs are essential to taking this data and creating the 3D simulations (BioDigital uses a Quadro 3700 to create its simulations, which can be run on a PC with a consumer-level GPU). BioDigital also creates simulators for complex surgical procedures, allowing students to follow along from beginning to end, and see what can happen when things go wrong. Session attendees got to see a surgery to correct a skull defect broken down into clickable steps that showed 3D animation of the procedure at the same time that a video inset showed the actual surgery. "It's like a living book," Oliker said. Medical students learning from the surgery are able to view the simulation using NVIDIA 3D Vision kits. One of the most interesting examples was Oliker's demonstration of a haptics device that simulated anesthetic injection in dental procedures. While an animation displayed a virtual patient (with a big, virtual needle), Oliker showed how he could manipulate the device and get tactile feedback on needle position and underlying anatomy. The presentation brought home the challenges in training doctors and standardizing certain surgical procedures, but also the excitement of where the field is going (for instance, real-time surgical reconstructions). Audience members applauded at the end (perhaps out of relief that future dentists will have BioDigital's haptics training before they start seeing patients), and stayed to talk to Oliker for additional Q&A.
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| Emerging Companies Provide Insight and Inspiration for the GPU Community Posted: 22 Sep 2010 12:33 PM PDT The idea of ecosystems is a well-established one in the technology world, with a constantly growing lineup of companies that can best be described as hubs. Examples are everywhere: Amazon has become a retail and cloud computing hub for smaller companies looking to leverage its technology investments; Google is a hub for businesses that want to incorporate search but don't want to build search capabilities themselves; and Salesforce.com is an emerging cloud computing hub for companies that don't want to develop their own applications.
Taking a cue from those companies, NVIDIA has in recent years been working to establish its own ecosystem for companies trying to further the capabilities of GPU technology. The idea is to promote the myriad ways in which GPUs are used in order to inspire other small companies to tap the power of the GPU for their own businesses. On Wednesday, the Emerging Companies Summit portion of the GPU Technology Conference kicked off, showcasing a few of the startups that are innovating with GPUs and are willing to share their experiences. Jeff Herbst, NVIDIA's VP of business development, made no bones about the fact that building an ecosystem of startups has taken on added importance in a sluggish economy where venture funds are difficult to raise and companies are opting to leverage the investments of others rather than repeating them. One of the companies NVIDIA highlighted was Universal Robotics, which builds robots that can learn and think, allowing them to perform such functions as sorting packages. GPU technology is essentially serving as the hippocampus that allows the company's robots to determine their actions based on input from 50 different channels, from infrared to vision to touch. It's a complex undertaking that requires massive parallel computing, a natural setting for GPUs, said David Peters, founder and CEO. Elsewhere, OptiTex is tapping GPUs in an effort to revolutionize online clothes shopping. The company develops pattern-making software and 3D cloth simulation programs that together make it possible to simulate a person wearing garments and walking around, thus setting the stage for online shoppers to actually be able to see an approximation of what various clothing items will look like on their bodies. Joram Burg, president of OptiTex USA, says the company plans to work with game developers and moviemakers on ways to put its technology to use in those arenas, and he foresees consumers soon being able to place images of their own heads on top of simulation models for added personalization. "That's where the technology is taking us," he said. On the medical front, a French company called Useful Progress, led by founder Sylvain Ordureau, has been tapping the power of GPUs to create unprecedented 3D models of the human internal anatomy, which the company hopes will enable breakthroughs in medical science. NVIDIA, meanwhile, is hopeful that by sharing the stories of some of its cutting edge customers, it will inspire others to innovate similarly around the GPU—or, in the spirit of a true ecosystem, piggyback on the innovation that's already taken place. |
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