NVIDIA Emerging Companies Summit

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nvidiaFor those following our coverage of the NVIDIA GPU Tech Conference this week, I decided to take a slightly different route in covering the fringe topic of emerging companies surrounding the recent GPU computing explosion.  For the second year in a row, NVIDIA is hosting an emerging companies summit alongside their technical conference.  (Last year it was held alongside NVISION).

This year, the keynote for the event was delivered by Jeff Herbst, VP of Business Development for NVIDIA.  Prior to his keynote presentation, I didn’t realize how seriously NVIDIA considered their role of igniting the innovative fires surrounding their core technology.  Jeff coined their motto in business development as “Supporting the Ecosystem.”  This is a very interesting perspective on the part of NVIDIA.  This implies that their relationship with OEMs and end users is symbiotic in nature (as it should be).  NVIDIA launched a GPU Ventures project in March of this year in order to become even more pervasive within their user community.

I was able to speak with the CEO of Milabra, Samuel Cox, yesterday evening.  Milabra is one of sixty such organizations that has aligned its core technology very closely with the NVIDIA core architecture.  Ever heard of Milabra?  Me neither!  They are doing for images what Google AdWords has done for text.  They’re essentially using NVIDIA GPU technology to classify and extract rich sets of information from images on the web.  Once they classify this image data, they deliver point-based ads based on the resulting info.  They’re already cataloging and mining info from billions (yes, billions with a ‘b’) of images with only 200 milliseconds of latency (from image delivery to ad response).  They do so via their growing NVIDIA Tesla S1070 farm.  Not HPC, but very cool stuff!

This fundamental relationship is quite different than other vendor organizations.  I’ve seen all to many integrators and vendors that take a very NIH (not invented here) perspective on technical relationship development.  Kudos to the folks at NVIDIA for taking this approach.