[PR] NVIDIA Names Barcelona Supercomputing Center and Moscow State University as New CUDA Centers of Excellence

Groundbreaking Organisations Join List of 13 Elite Institutions Dedicated to Advancing GPU Computing Research and Education

SINGAPORE — November 14, 2011 — NVIDIA today added two institutions to the list of 13 global CUDA Centers of Excellence: the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and Lomonosov Moscow State University.

The CUDA Center of Excellence designation is the highest honour given to institutions for roundbreaking work leveraging NVIDIA GPUs and NVIDIA® CUDA® technology. Recipients receive a range of GPU computing equipment and grants from NVIDIA.

Barcelona Supercomputing Center, a high-performance computing research center associated with the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya/Barcelona Tech, is Spain’s national supercomputing facility and home to one of Europe’s most powerful supercomputers, the MareNostrum. It has also recently deployed Spain’s fastest compute cluster with 256 NVIDIA Tesla™ M2090 GPUs and quadcore CPUs, delivering a peak performance of 186 teraflops. The Center’s research projects are focused on the fields of computational sciences, life sciences and earth sciences, and its supercomputing systems have been used by hundreds of researchers from over 40 countries.

In addition to offering a range of parallel computing courses and training programmes, Barcelona Supercomputing Center today announced plans to build the world’s first ARM-based CPU/GPU hybrid supercomputer using energy efficient NVIDIA Tegra™ ARM CPUs and high-performance NVIDIA CUDA GPUs.

Lomonosov Moscow State University is one of the world’s leading supercomputing centers dedicated to applying computational resources to vital scientific problems. Home to more than 40,000 graduate and post-graduate students, and 5,000 researchers, the university hosts four supercomputing clusters, including the ‘Lomonsov’ system, which is ranked 13th on the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

More than 500 scientific groups from Moscow University, institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences and other research institutions in Russia use Moscow University’s supercomputing center, focused on scientific research across a variety of disciplines. MSU-sponsored research is focused on the following areas: magneto-hydrodynamics, quantum chemistry, seismology, drug design, geology, and material science among others.

Other CUDA Centers of Excellence include: John Hopkins University, Stanford University, Harvard University, Institute of Process Engineering at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, National Taiwan University, Tokyo Tech, Tsinghua University (China), University of Cambridge, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Maryland, University of Tennessee, Georgia Tech, and University of Utah. For more information on the NVIDIA CUDA Center of Excellence program, visit: http://research.nvidia.com/content/cuda-centers-excellence.

CUDA is NVIDIA’s parallel computing architecture, which enables dramatic increases in computing performance by harnessing the power of GPUs. NVIDIA CUDA GPUs support all GPU computing programming models, APIs, and languages, including CUDA C/C++/Fortran, OpenCL, DirectCompute, and the recently announced Microsoft C++ AMP. More than 470 universities and institutions worldwide teach the CUDA programming model within their curriculum. For more information on NVIDIA CUDA technology, visit: www.nvidia.com/cuda