Michael Feldman over at HPCwire does a good job knitting together three apparently separate announcements from NVIDIA this week into a coherent tale of GPU domination by the compute and graphics company
On Tuesday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, NVIDIA announced a new platform that positions the GPU as the engine of a 3D Internet. In a nutshell, the company has constructed a Web services model that employs server-side Tesla GPUs to drive photorealistic imaging to client applications. The idea is to take advantage of the computational muscle of HPC-class GPUs so that high-end imaging applications in areas like medical diagnostics, product design, and manufacturing CAE can be co-located to the cloud.
…On Wednesday, Georgia Tech announced that the NSF is pitching in $12 million over five years to fund a project for two GPU-equipped supercomputers under its Track 2 program. …The big winners on the vendor side are HP, who will build the Intel-based HPC systems, and (you guessed it) NVIDIA, who will provide the GPU hardware. The first deployment is slated for “early 2010” and will indeed contain NVIDIA’s next-generation Fermi GPUs.
…Coincidental with the release of Windows 7, NVIDIA decided to remind us that its current crop of DirectX 10 GPUs already support DirectCompute, and its next-gen DirectX 11 Fermi chips will do likewise.
We covered the first two of these stories here and here. More in Michael’s post.
