The NVIDIA Blog | |
- Behind the Scenes at GTC 2012
- Sonic Spins Into Your Tegra Mobile Device
- Titan Supercomputer Session Showcases Science on GPUs
| Posted: 16 May 2012 09:29 AM PDT  We thought you might be interested in getting a peek at how a keynote address is powered at GTC. Back stage in the keynote hall, it's a world of screens and wires, the digital guts of modern presentations. And technicians dressed in black, often with headsets, who are under staggering pressure once the curtain goes up.
This Mission Control helps us entertain our attendees while sharing insight into very complex scientific challenges. It brings memorable demos to life. And it fuels the entire show with an unmistakable electricity. This year's GTC is the biggest to date. Thousands of attendees. 300+ sessions and 120+ posters. And the three keynotes will sweep through a lot of territory. The world's first GPU in the cloud was the focus of Tuesday's keynote. Wednesday's will focus on modeling collective behavior, such as movement of locust swarms in Africa. And we'll wrap up with a talk on the challenges of landing a rover on the moon. Check out the behind-the-scenes photo gallery below.      | ||
| Sonic Spins Into Your Tegra Mobile Device Posted: 16 May 2012 07:13 AM PDT  Sonic and his sidekick Tails have officially come to Android OS. Sonic 4: Episode II on NVIDIA Tegra 3 officially launches today – with multiplayer co-op action and graphics-boosting optimizations in tow. To properly welcome the hedgehog back to the world of gaming, Sega worked with NVIDIA to create an Android game with the kind of graphics chops usually found only on consoles. Sonic 4: Episode II shows off Sonic and Tail's gold ring-catching skills with higher quality lighting, more polygons and complex textures – all made possible by the NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor, the world's only 4-PLUS-1 mobile processor. Let's take a look at some side-by-side screenshots of Sonic 4: Episode II on a Tegra 3 device and on a non-Tegra device. You'll notice the boosted graphics below on the right with a background that looks much more alive, as well as beautiful glow effects and additional background settings.
Play as Sonic or jump into multiplayer co-op action with your inimitable flying buddy Tails to deal some damage to Dr. Robotnik and save the world. Just connect to other Tegra devices via Bluetooth and you'll be coop gaming in no time. And, when you're ready to crank it up, you can hook up a wireless gaming controller and vanquish evil on a TV – for console-quality gaming wherever you are. Grab Sonic 4: Episode II on your Tegra 3 device today on TegraZone. | ||
| Titan Supercomputer Session Showcases Science on GPUs Posted: 15 May 2012 07:47 PM PDT  When the massive Titan supercomputer goes live this fall at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), it will be positioned to take the title as the world's fastest supercomputer to the U.S. That makes for great headlines, but, as researchers shared during a session at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference (GTC) Tuesday, Titan's impact will be a dramatic breakthough in scientific computing. Nearly three years after Jeff Nichols, ORNL's associate lab director for Computing and Computational Sciences, joined NVIDIA CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang on stage at GTC 2009, Nichols and several scientists have big plans for Titan—which is being be built by Cray.
"The whole system is an upgrade," said Jack Wells, director of science at ORNL, in describing how Oak Ridge's current Jaguar supercomputer is being transformed into Titan. ORNL is transitioning from Cray's XT5 compute blades to their XK6 compute blades, which use hybrid chipsets comprised of AMD Opteron CPUs and NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. Application benchmarks conducted thus far have demonstrated that the XK6 is yielding performance improvements ranging from 50 percent to 230 percent compared with the XT5. Wells said Titan is expected to deliver breakthrough science for the Energy Department (which ORNL is associated with), the supercomputing industry and the nation at large. More specifically, it's expected to enable advances in research of earth system science, fundamental science and energy. It will also benefit from NVIDIA's new Kepler high-performance computing architecture, announced by Jen-Hsun at his GTC Opening Keynote. Titan will incorporate nearly 15,000 Kepler GPUs. Transforming the Jaguar system into Titan will also increase the number of processing cores in play. "To take advantage of the vastly larger parallelism in Titan, users need to use hierarchical parallelism in their codes," according to Jack. One of the early applications highlighted during the series of Titan-related sessions is an effort at Sandia National Laboratories to research methods for reducing the environmental impact of fossil fuels. Jacqueline Chen, from Sandia's combustion research facility and the Chinese Institute of Engineers' 2009 Asian American Engineer of the Year, said that fossil fuels account for 83 percent of energy use in the U.S. Transportation alone accounts for two-thirds of petroleum usage and one-fourth of all CO2 emissions. National goals call to reduce petroleum use 25 percent by 2020 and reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050. Clearly, scientific research will play a key role in meeting those goals. Jacqueline's team will leverage the power of Titan through ORNL's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program, which helps research teams conduct computing-intensive, large-scale research projects that promise to advance science and engineering. |
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