The NVIDIA Blog

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GTC Asia Wraps Up With Flurry of Workshops, Lectures Posted: 15 Dec 2011 10:04 AM PST GTC Asia's second and final day drew to a rousing close Thursday in Bejing, with more than 40 workshops and lectures, and a closing keynote by Steve Scott, chief technologist for NVIDIA's HPC business. With more than 1,500 attendees from 40 countries, the event's closing session focused on a dizzying range of topics, including modeling techniques for space exploration, monsoons and oil-reserve exploration. Each of these disciplines now uses heterogeneous computing to accelerate massively complicating computing tasks. In a morning lecture, Dan Negrut, of University of Wisconsin, showcased his team's work on granular terrain simulation.  His team has used the GPU to more accurately represent terrain issues encountered by the Mars Rover, resulting in a 10x acceleration. Among the examples he showed were demonstrations involving the manipulation of thousands of M&Ms and golf balls, eachl individually manipulated by the GPU. Anthony Lichnewsky talks about finding oil reserves with GPU technology In a separate track, Anthony Lichnewsky, software architect at oil-giant Schlumberger, described the sobering race against time we're facing to find more oil reserves.  He noted that most of the world's "easily-found" reserves have already been tapped, leaving only reserves in challenging spots characterized by deep water and harsh climates. The previous CPU-based computing solutions his firm relied on can't compute fast enough, getting hung up on compute-intensive 'kernel' work that chews up precious hours.  Lichnewsky's team has turned to GPU-enabled solutions to help explorers find oil more efficiently. In the closing keynote, Scott, who came to NVIDIA earlier this year from Cray, where he had served as chief technology officer, focused on the future of high-performance computing, honing in on exaflop computing and power efficiency. He reiterated a common theme over this week's event, arguing that we will be severely constrained by power if we continue to follow the same computing path of decades past. Citing the many applications and industries that have recently adopted GPU computing, and the coming introduction of NVIDIA's Kepler (2012) and Maxwell (2014) GPU architecture, Scott expressed his excitement for the HPC industry. The closing keynote also honored 14 Chinese university students for their work in areas ranging from astronomy to video processing, within a CUDA coding contest, sponsored by NVIDIA. The 14 students received awards and plaques, including a first-place cash prize of RMB20,000. Scott also presented Shanghai Jiao Tong University with a CUDA Center of Excellence award, recognizing its groundbreaking work using GPUs and CUDA and its plans to build the fastest supercomputer of any university in China.

1,500 Volunteers Pitch In At Full Circle Farm Posted: 14 Dec 2011 12:08 PM PST The new farm stand is ready for business. Bright murals – hundreds of square feet of them – have been completed with a flourish. Large swathes of land have been primed for spring planting. And muscles have been strained way, way beyond their usual reach. Some 1,500 NVIDIA employees, family and community members racked up over 10,000 volunteer hours this past weekend at Full Circle Farm, the focus this year of Project Inspire, our annual volunteer event, held in place of a holiday party. With more than $380,000 invested in donated material and labor, the project has transformed the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based community farm and almost tripled the number of individuals it can serve. Full Circle Farm grows and sells fruit and veggies to consumers, schools and restaurants, and uses the proceeds to fund programs aimed at educating youth and families about where their food comes from and the importance of eating local. Several employees spent two days to build a farm stand for Full Circle Farm Over the course of Friday and Saturday, NVIDIA's troops tackled a series of projects. Among them: Building a demonstration teaching area:  We created an outdoor teaching and demonstration facility where students can learn about the science of food and how to prepare healthy meals that incorporate local produce. Improving storage and packing facilities:  We built and furnished a facility that will enable Full Circle Farm to better store and prepare the produce that it sells to restaurants, schools and individuals. Upgrading retail location: We built a beautiful, colorful structure that will welcome visitors and enable the Farm to sell its own produce. This new “Farm Stand” was used to sell farm produce for the first time yesterday. Expanding farm production capacity: We added irrigation to the farm's orchard, helped it increase the quality of its soil and improved its ability to plant and grow more produce. Increasing hosting facilities: We built and colorfully painted dozens of benches, tables and wine-country-style signs to better direct and host the increased visitors to the Farm. Check out what NVIDIA co-founder Chris Malachowsky and a few other employees have to say about why Project Inspire is so important to them: You can get another sense of the project through these amazing photos. This project was more than seven months in the making. We wouldn't have gotten much beyond the first step or two, though, without our partner City Year. They've been helping us execute Project Inspire since 2009, and it would simply be impossible to execute an undertaking like this without them. They are an inspiring organization that provides youth ages 17-24 with leadership skills and the opportunity to help at-risk students in schools all throughout the U.S. We're ever grateful to them for their hard work and public spiritedness.

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