The NVIDIA Blog

GPU-sphere Swells With 26 New CUDA Centers

Posted: 11 Jun 2012 09:54 AM PDT

Following the recent storm of GPU computing goodness raining across the GPU Technology Conference, it seems only right to welcome more than two dozen universities and research institutions to our family of CUDA Research Centers (CRC) and CUDA Teaching Centers (CTC).

The work being done at the 26 new CRC and CTC centers in 12 countries includes simulations of environmental phenomena, developing new materials and research into GPU computing collaboration across university departments. They bring the total number of such centers to 189.

CUDA Teaching centers equip tens of thousands of students graduating each year with the knowledge and expertise to take advantage of the parallel processing power of GPUs. These centers receive donated teaching kits, textbooks, software licenses, NVIDIA CUDA architecture-enabled GPUs for teaching lab computers and academic discounts for additional hardware.

CUDA Research Centers embrace GPU computing across multiple research fields. They have access to exclusive events with key researchers and academics, a designated NVIDIA technical liaison and specialized training sessions.

Here are some examples of CUDA-related work taking place at the newest CUDA Research Centers:

CILEA (Italy)

CILEA is working on projects related to advance statistical modeling of environmental phenomena with spatial and temporal components. The high-dimensional datasets considered and the computationally intensive algorithms used, such as Expectation-Maximization algorithm and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, highlight the demand of advanced computing technique. In order to address these kinds of problems we have developed an R Multi-GPUs package based on CUDA, MAGMA, CURAND, CUBLAS libraries.

Louisiana State University (U.S.)

Primary research focus of the LSU CUDA Research Center is placed on four projects. First, the Cactus CaKernel is a general framework for the development of parallel scientific applications, which hides the complexity of heterogeneous architectures in algorithmic modules. The second project involves extending the Pluto compiler with code generation capabilities for heterogeneous systems, providing native compiler GPU support. The third project focuses on ParalleX, an operating system approach to effective heterogenous computing. Fourth, the LA-SiGMA project is a statewide NSF funded computational materials science project targeting new materials development through computation and simulation.

University of Oxford (UK)

The CUDA Research Center at the University of Oxford is based within the Oxford e-Research Centre,which promotes innovative computational methodologies in multidisciplinary collaborations across the university. GPU computing collaborations covering a very wide range of applications currently exist with the departments of Chemistry, Engineering Science, Physics and Statistics, as well as the Mathematical Institute. Oxford University and the CUDA Research Center are also the lead in a consortium, which has acquired a 372-GPU system, the largest in the UK.

The other new CUDA Research Centers include: