Day 1: GPU Technology Conference

NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang speaks at 2009 GPU Technology Conference.

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang

The GPU Technology Conference started up Tuesday with a rousing keynote by Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang. The room was largely filled with developers, and Huang’s message that MATLAB, Ansys, and Amber HPC applications are all now running on the Tesla GPU platform was well received.

With demos that spanned from to real-time rendering to automotive design to robotic heart surgery, Huang did a great job of focusing his talk not on technology, but on how people are using GPUs to “change the world.” There are literally hundreds of millions GPUs out there in the wild, and I think the democratization of parallel HPC computing is here thanks to CUDA and some very smart technology bets made by Nvidia.

Don’t kid yourself. GPUs are a game-changer.” said Frank Chambers, a GTC conference attendee shopping for GPUs for his finite element analysis work. “What we are seeing here is like going from propellers to jet engines. That made transcontinental flights routine. Wide access to this kind of computing power is making things like artificial retinas possible, and that wasn’t predicted to happen until 2060.”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRPzqWNzO60

This conference has been a pleasant surprise for me in a number of ways. It’s only in it’s second year, yet the remarkable growth and energy here is notable:

  • More than 140 press and industry analysts
  • Four times the response to call for talks
  • Twice the number of talks, up to nearly 300 hours
  • Twice the number of products and technology being demo’ed
  • Several thousand attendees from 50+ countries
  • Researchers/scientists from 200+ universities, national labs and govt agencies
  • Nearly 100 CEO/CTOs

I think we are witnessing the birth of a new computing ecosystem here. The exhibitors are incredibly enthusiastic and have great demos to show. Today’s news may not seem like a big deal at first look, but, as one speaker said today, the porting of MATLAB opens up GPU computing to anyone who knows math. To me, that adds up to a rising groundswell.

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Comments

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    CEO
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