The NVIDIA Blog

NVIDIA Snags Nine HPCWire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards

Posted: 15 Nov 2011 09:10 AM PST

During yesterday's SC11 opening ceremony, HPCWire announced its 2011 Readers' and Editors' Choice Awards recognizing leading high-performance computing companies – nine of which went to NVIDIA.

The annual awards, which are featured on HPCWire, showcase companies that are making the biggest impact for HPC customers and the industry as a whole. NVIDIA, as well as a number of our products, including Tesla and Quadro GPUs and CUDA, won the top spot in the following categories:

Readers' Choice Awards:

Top 5 Vendors to Watch: NVIDIA
Top 5 New Products or Technologies to Watch: NVIDIA Tesla GPU Computing
Best Use of HPC In Life Sciences: NVIDIA Tesla GPUs
Best Use of HPC in Financial Services: NVIDIA Tesla GPUs for JP Morgan Chase
Best Use of HPC in the Entertainment Industry: NVIDIA CUDA and Quadro Technologies
Best HPC Software Product or Technology: NVIDIA Next-generation CUDA Architecture
Best HPC Collaboration Between Government and Industry: NVIDIA In Partnership with Tokyo Institute of Technology, Data Direct Networks, NEC, Intel, Microsoft, Mellanox/ Voltaire, and HP for TSUBAME 2.0

Editors' Choice Awards:

Top 5 New Products or Technologies to Watch: NVIDIA Kepler GPU
Top 5 Vendors to Watch: NVIDIA

The number and types of awards bestowed upon NVIDIA this year indicate some key industry trends that are worth noting:

The HPC industry is embracing GPUs/parallel computing with enthusiasm
In just four short years GPUs have matured from concept to broad acceptance in the HPC space. Today, three of the world's top five supercomputers use GPU technology to drive breakthroughs in a range of scientific fields – the recent whole simulation of the H1N1 virus, for example.
GPUs are increasingly being used to solve real-world problems
From accelerating research in the Life Sciences to the powering large compute-intensive financial systems, GPU supercomputers are not just technology "experiments." They are making a significant and measureable impact today.
Big things are coming from NVIDIA
I believe the reason we won both the "Top 5 Vendors" and "Top 5 Products or Technologies" awards – from both readers and HPCWire editors – has to do with HPCWire's high expectations for NVIDIA to deliver great things down the road. The HPC industry is excited about our higher-performance Kepler architecture, and is expecting NVIDIA to continue innovating with our parallel computing technologies – both on the hardware and software (CUDA) side.

If you'd like to learn more about the HPCWire 2011 awards, I recommend you visit www.HPCWire.com.

NVIDIA Maximus Set to Revolutionize the Workstation

Posted: 14 Nov 2011 01:27 PM PST

Design and creative professionals have been anticipating a workstation that simultaneously performs complex analysis and visualization for over 25 years. Today we announce its arrival with the introduction of NVIDIA Maximus technology.

As engineering and creative professionals pushed the limits of yesterday's technology, they found themselves limited by the workstation's inability to perform graphics- and compute-intensive processing (e.g., interactive design and simulation) at the same time. Engineers and designers had been forced to work around these limitations by performing compute intensive work such as photo realistic rendering or complex simulation at night, during lunch or on separate systems.

The creative and design process breaks down when users can't see the results of their design choices in context and on demand.

NVIDIA Maximus technology allows professionals to process compute-heavy tasks at their desks while simultaneously serving up visually demanding graphics. With this new technology, professionals have the freedom to act on ideas immediately. For example, when a product designer believes a component of their design is complete, NVIDIA Maximus allows them to immediately begin validation simulation at their desk – while still continuing to act on new design ideas with full interactive 3D graphics. Their creative work process is no longer tied down by the limitations imposed on them by traditional workstations.

This will have a profound impact on the industry.

For example, stylists at BMW historically had to send their models to another team to render photo realistic, physically accurate images on a server farm. This meant they had to communicate with additional teams in order to share resources on a group cluster. With NVIDIA Maximus, these stylists now have enough desktop power to interact with photo-realistic previews of its luxury performance vehicles without the wait. Previously, it would have taken 120 CPU cores on a shared cluster to match the rendering time achieved by an NVIDIA Maximus-powered workstation on a desk.

NVIDIA Maximus brings together the power of an NVIDIA Quadro Graphics Processing unit (GPU) and the new NVIDIA Tesla C2075 companion processor under a unified technology that transparently assigns work to the right processor and is certified by industry leading application vendors.

With the support of the world's leading workstation manufacturers, such as HP, Dell, Lenovo and Fujitsu, NVIDIA Maximus-powered workstations are available immediately to dramatically transform engineering and design workflows.

Want to see more? Check out some of the demo videos below to see what NVIDIA Maximus can do.

NVIDIA Maximus makes photorealistic rendering in CATIA V6 completely interactive