NVIDIA GTC Debrief

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For those of you following this week’s coverage of the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference, I wanted to take a quick minute and reflect on the previous three days.  As I sit here and contemplate (over a tasty Hefeweizen) how to summarize the events, one word seems to bubble up in my head: electric.

I’ve been attending technical conferences from coast to coast for a number of years and never have I experienced the electricity that I felt here.  The hallways were abuzz with all sorts of burgeoning ideas on how to retask the GPU with new work.  The hallways were lined with posters detailing the work of countless educational and research institutions from all over the world.  I admit, I often miss much of the poster content from Supercomputing.  I found myself stopping mid-stride to analyze an overwhelming number of them here at GTC.

I had the pleasure of dining with several NVIDIA folks yesterday for lunch.  They were extremely pleased with the response from all the startups, researchers and participants whom submitted papers and projects for the conference.  Never have I seen the (often fickle) members of the HPC community latch on to a technology so fast and with such ferocity.  All in all, its pretty amazing.

The aforementioned electricity of the event was deeply embedded not only in the participants, but in NVIDIA as well.  The NVIDIA folks delivered their presentations, press releases and product announcements, then sat back and genuinely listened to their users.  In my opinion, the event was an overall success.  I learned a lot, reconnected with friends and listened to some wonderful presentations.

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  1. […] announced details today on this year’s GPU Technology Conference [GTC 2010].  Last year, insideHPC was on hand to report live on all the sights, sounds and juicy news directly from San Jose.  This year, the conference will […]

  2. […] had the pleasure of attending last year’s GTC.  It was one of the best technical conferences I have ever attended.  For more info and […]

Comments

  1. I really like the slideshow. You guys should do more of this type of thing. Thanks for sharing.

  2. John I have to agree with your take on the GTC (I was also strolling the halls and rushing from keynotes to various oversubscribed sessions ;). I was interesting and heartening to see the HPC community (a naturally very conservative crowd) start to really warm to the subject of acceleration and heterogeneous compute. It has been, I am bound to say, a very long time coming, with many companies working hard to plant the seeds that are just starting to bear fruit.

    Fermi looks like a big step forward for NVIDIA and it will be interesting to see how their follow on engagements with the likes of Cray and Oak Ridge pan out in the next year. I will be look forward to next years GTC (with such a positive reaction to this years it must be a dead cert) and to see what kind of momentum has been built by then.