NVIDIA names Georgia Institute of Technology a CUDA Center of Excellence

SANTA CLARA, USA: NVIDIA has recognized the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) as a CUDA Center of Excellence.

One of the world's premier engineering and science universities, Georgia Tech is engaged in a wide number of research, development and educational activities which leverage GPU Computing.

Jeffrey Vetter, joint professor of the Georgia Tech College of Computing and Group Leader at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, will serve as principal investigator of the CUDA Center of Excellence.

"Georgia Tech has a long history of education and research that depends heavily on the parallel processing capabilities that NVIDIA has introduced with its CUDA architecture," Vetter said. "This award allows us to focus, what is now a large amount of activity across 25 different research groups, under a single center, which will significantly amplify our research capabilities."

Georgia Tech's non-profit research arm, Georgia Tech Research Institute, is also leveraging the capabilities of the GPU in its work with industry and government groups such as the US Defense Department.

"By cross-pollinating ideas and skills, sharing software and hardware facilities, and streamlining interactions with priority access to NVIDIA staff and capabilities, this status will add considerable strength to our research and educational programs,"
Vetter added.

NVIDIA and Georgia Tech are already collaborating on a number of projects that will help shape the national science infrastructure. The National Science Foundation Track 2D Keeneland Project will initially deploy a significant system of NVIDIA Tesla processors this year, with a larger, petaflop-class system to be in place by 2012.

Georgia Tech and Oak Ridge are also collaborating with NVIDIA in the recently announced DARPA Ubiquitous High Performance Computing program, with the goal of designing an energy efficient "petaflop in a cabinet¿ prototype system in 2018.

One example of the work the University is doing in the field of software tools is "Ocelot", a compiler that allows CUDA code to run seamlessly on multi-core CPUs. The compiler will be available and distributed through the CCOE and will help to catalyze research on top of this open source infrastructure.

Georgia Tech joins a select group of 10 other universities and research organizations in the US and abroad, including Harvard University, Cambridge University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, that are designated as a CUDA Center of Excellence. More than 350 universities worldwide teach the CUDA programming model within their curriculum.

CUDA is NVIDIA's computing architecture that enables its GPUs to be programmed using industry standard programming languages and APIs, opening up their massive parallel processing power to a broad range of applications beyond graphics.