The NVIDIA Blog

NVIDIA Again Awarding $25,000 Grants to Student Researchers
Supporting Student Success – One Backpack at a Time
Using GPU Computing to Mine for Business Intelligence Gold
Cut The Cord – Turn Your Tegra Tablet Into A Wireless Game Console

NVIDIA Again Awarding $25,000 Grants to Student Researchers

Posted: 01 Sep 2011 09:14 AM PDT

The world has big scientific research-problems that are being tackled head-on with the help of GPU computing, and we want to help solve them.

Today, we are launching our 11^th Annual Graduate Fellowship Program, which advances the frontiers of science by awarding grants and providing technical support to graduate students who are doing outstanding GPU-based research.

Up to 10 Ph.D. students from around the world will be selected to receive grants of $25,000 each for research that advances parallel computing. In addition to receiving funding for their research, award recipients will also have access to NVIDIA technology and programming talent. These grants and technical support will be awarded in the 2012 academic year.

Since its inception in 2002, the NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship Program has awarded 95 Ph.D. graduate students with grants that have helped accelerate their research efforts. More importantly, this funding has helped some students achieve major breakthroughs in their research – breakthroughs that may not have been possible without additional funding.

The NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship Program is open to applicants worldwide. The deadline for submitting applications is Dec. 8, 2011. Eligible graduate students will have already completed their first year of Ph.D. level studies in the areas of computer science, computer engineering, system architecture, electrical engineering or a related area. In addition, applicants will have current membership on an active research team.

For more information on eligibility and how to apply, visit http://research.nvidia.com/relevant/graduate-fellowship-program or email fellowship@nvidia.com.

Supporting Student Success – One Backpack at a Time

Posted: 01 Sep 2011 09:00 AM PDT

When the NVIDIA Foundation, our charitable arm, asks employees each year what our top priorities should be, invariably they come back with improving both access to education and the quality of schools. As a result, we have donated more than $2 million to education causes worldwide since 2008.

Our employees also use their own wallets, muscle and brainpower to improve learning opportunities for students all over the world. Here are a few examples:

Hyderabad employees pass out backpacks to
students at the NVIDIA Government Primary School

In Hyderabad, our employees recently handed out new backpacks and water bottles to students at a local primary school — an tradition started when our India team first adopted the school six years ago. In Pune, employees donated funds (which were matched by the NVIDIA Foundation) to build a classroom in a new school for visually impaired girls. The classroom is to open this fall to provide education and job skills for these young girls.

In the US, employees in field offices like Austin, Tex., Beaverton, Ore., and Fort Collins, Col., hold back-to-school drives where employees donate backpacks filled with school supplies to low income youth. They provided 1,236 backpacks this year, exceeding our goal by more than 20 percent. In just the past few years, our U.S. employees have donated more than 7,000 backpacks to deserving kids in their neighborhoods.

Santa Clara employees build activity kits to be
donated to K-12 teachers throughout Silicon Valley

And at our Santa Clara, Calif. headquarters, several hundred employees helped equip math and science teachers for the upcoming school year. We partnered with Resource Area For Teaching to engage our employees in making hovercrafts, chromatography kits and spectroscope kits – made of recycled office supplies. Together, over 600 employees made 3,750 kits. Since each kit serves several students, we're improving the classroom experience for approximately 61,000 kids in Silicon Valley this year.

Are you passionate about education? Consider mentoring or tutoring at your local school or donating to a classroom in your town. Organizations we think are worthy of your consideration: Resource Area for Teaching, Room to Read, and Mission Backpack.

Using GPU Computing to Mine for Business Intelligence Gold

Posted: 31 Aug 2011 05:17 PM PDT

The value of business data is increasingly dramatically. So, it was timely that this month's Silicon Valley HPC/GPU Supercomputing Meetup Group (see below for more information about them) featured a talk by Ren Wu, Research Scientist at HP Labs, who spoke about using GPUs to accelerate business intelligence (BI) analytics.

BI analytics, also known as advanced analytics, refers to computer technologies used to mine relevant business information from raw data. BI analytics can give a company insight into historical, current or future-looking business operations.

During his talk, Ren illustrated the technology trends and challenges surrounding BI analytics and how he led a team to study the viability of GPUs as BI accelerators. He proposed that the BI space is moving towards using massively parallel accelerators, GPUs (where he believes that the "G" really could stand for "general purpose"), for BI analytics.

According to Gartner, as of 2010, advanced analytics is a top technology that can't be ignored, trailing only cloud computing. The BI market is at $11 billion and Forrester predicts it will grow to $14 billion by 2014.

Back in 2007, an IBM exec spoke about how organizations that are able to sift through data quickly (some in real time) are gaining a competitive advantage over others. For example, the NYC Police Department was able to solve crimes and capture suspects more quickly with a real-time Crime Information "Warehouse" that helped them more quickly gather, share and act on updated reports and evidence. Many examples exist in the business world, as well.

Ren further illustrated experimental designs and results that showed an order of magnitude performance advantage for GPU over their optimized CPU implementations. This led his team to conclude that GPUs are viable accelerators for BI analytics. Ren's presentation on this topic at GTC 2010 can be found here (with downloadable video here), his supporting discussion slides are here (PDF link) and his earlier interview via CUDA spotlight is here.

While advanced analytics is an attractive space for acceleration, there are also challenges. Large datasets are a given for advanced analytics. The question of whether GPUs would help accelerate BI analytics over CPU-only solutions is intriguing: How compute-intensive are the usage scenarios? Would using GPUs yield much faster response time addressing much larger datasets in advanced analytics? What does it take to transform massive-scale, multi-channel, multi-modal data into pervasive, always-on BI?

We would love to hear your experience using GPUs to accelerate analytics. What were your challenges? How did you overcome them?

About the HPC/GPU Supercomputing Meetup Group:
As this is just one of many stimulating talks and discussions at this Meetup group, here is some background: Jike Chong initiated the Silicon Valley group in February 2011, the group has attracted 200+ members, many of them pioneer parallel software practitioners who are passionate about high performance computing and GPU supercomputing. If you find topics in these areas interesting, join the discussion on Monday, Sept. 12.

Cut The Cord – Turn Your Tegra Tablet Into A Wireless Game Console

Posted: 31 Aug 2011 01:25 PM PDT

Riptide GP, an exclusive Tegra Zone gaming title, now allows you to easily connect your wireless game controller to your Tegra-powered tablet device. This guide will show you how to configure Riptide GP to work with a wireless game controller for a true console gaming experience.

So, let's get started…

For this tutorial, we used the Tegra-powered Motorola Xoom Android tablet and a Logitech wireless USB game controller (which comes bundled with a USB wireless dongle). We also connected our Xoom to our TV using HDMI-out to play the game on the big screen. For the Xoom, we used a microUSB wireless adapter that allows the Logitech wireless USB dongle to work with the Xoom’s microUSB port. For Tegra-powered Android tablets with a full-size USB port, you can simply use the full-size USB dongle included with the Logitech wireless USB game controller – no need for a microUSB-to-USB adapter.

Step 1
While playing Riptide GP, pause the game and scroll over to the Help & Options screen.

Step 2
Go to Settings, then Controls.

Setting up the Logitech wireless controller
in Riptide GP’s settings menu.

Step 3
By default you'll be set to Tilt controls. You'll want to change this using the arrows at the top of the screen. There are two options, "Single Stick" and "Dual Stick." For the simpler control pads, "Single stick" works but for our Logitech game controller, we went with "Dual Stick."

Optional additional step
If you want to re-map your controller button actions, simply tap on the target button on the screen, then tap the button you'd like to re-map on your controller.

That's it! You're now ready for a wireless, console-quality gaming experience with Riptide GP.

Vector Unit created Riptide GP exclusively for Tegra. NVIDIA recently called on the folks at Vector Unit to showcase this awesome feature on Tegra-powered devices. Developers Matt Small and Ralf Knoesel were more than happy to work with NVIDIA – they got to see our state-of-the-art creative studio and work with our talented producers. Check out their demo video below.

If you want to set up your Bluetooth controller to play Riptide GP, check out the instructions on the developer's website here.