[PR] NVIDIA Expands CUDA Developer Ecosystem with New CUDA Research and Teaching Centres in the US, Canada and Europe

New Centers Recognised for GPU Computing Expertise; Add to Base of More Than 350 Universities and Training Centres Offering CUDA Courses, Conducting CUDA-powered Research

SINGAPORE — September 23, 2010 — NVIDIA today announced the addition of new research and educational centres dedicated to leveraging the immense processing power of graphics processing units (GPUs) to address today’s most challenging computing issues.

CUDA Research Centres are recognised institutions that embrace and utilise GPU computing across multiple research fields. CUDA Teaching Centres are institutions that have integrated GPU computing techniques into their mainstream computer programming curriculum. The new centres are:

CUDA Research Centres:

• Barcelona Supercomputing Center, UPC (Spain)
• Clemson University
• HP Labs
• Massachusetts General Hospital – Northeastern University
• Swinburne University of Technology (Australia)
• University of California at Los Angeles – UCLA
• University of Warsaw (Poland)

CUDA Teaching Centres:

• American University of Beirut (Lebanon)
• Florida A&M University
• Hood College
• McMaster University (Canada)
• University of California at Los Angeles – UCLA
• University of Minnesota
• University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Launched in June 2010, the CUDA Research Centre programme fosters collaboration with research groups at universities and research institutes that are expanding the frontier of massively parallel computing. Among the benefits are exclusive events with key researchers and academics, a designated NVIDIA® technical liaison and access to specialised online and in-person training sessions.

“HP Labs conducts high-impact scientific research to address the most important challenges and opportunities facing our customers and society in the next decade,” said Dr Ren Wu, senior scientist at HP. “The CUDA architecture represents the next evolution of high-performance computing, and HP Labs has been working with NVIDIA for some time to ensure that HP’s professional computing products leverage the latest GPU computing technologies and practices. HP Labs is proud to be recognised by NVIDIA for our innovative work in massively parallel computing and the value we are providing to customers.”

The CUDA Teaching Centre programme, also launched in June 2010, is the first programme of its kind to be developed and offered to universities and colleges by a hardware vendor. The programme has many benefits, including the donation of teaching kits consisting of textbooks, software licenses and CUDA™ architecture-enabled GPUs for teaching lab computers, as well as academic discounts for additional hardware if required.

“The addition of these new educational programmes underscores the tremendous interest in harnessing the power of GPUs to solve a today’s most pressing computing challenges,” said Sanford Russell, general manager of CUDA & GPU Computing at NVIDIA. “There are more than 350 universities worldwide teaching the CUDA programming model within their curriculum, and more than 100,000 programmers actively developing applications that use the GPU. With the addition of these new programmes, we expect to see even broader interest and adoption of GPU computing practices across a wide variety of industries worldwide.”

Existing CUDA Research Centres include: John Hopkins University, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), Technical University of Ostrava (Czech Republic), CSIRO (Australia), ICHEC (Ireland) and SINTEF (Norway). Existing CUDA Teaching Centres include State University of New York, Potsdam (US), California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, ITESM (Mexico), Czech Technical University (Czech Republic), and Qingdao University (China).

These programmes augment the CUDA Centre of Excellence programme, the elite network of 11 institutes focused on advancing parallel computing on the GPU. They are: Cambridge University, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology, Harvard University, University of Maryland, National Taiwan University, Tokyo Tech, Tsinghua University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Tennessee, and University of Utah.

For more information on NVIDIA research activities and these programmes, please visit the NVResearch site.