The Official NVIDIA Blog

I am very proud to be part of the NVIDIA team that helped bring NVIDIA Optimus technology to market today. It is quite gratifying to see an idea we had several years ago finally come to pass with flying colors. The concept of Optimus is deceptively simple: use the best graphics device for the job, automatically, transparently, on the fly, and so fast the end user cannot tell anything is happening under the hood.

I was also part of the team that helped pioneer switchable graphics to market in notebook computers when it first appeared in the Sony VAIO SZ back in 2006. At the time switchable graphics was very innovative because it allowed a notebook computer to use both a discrete GPU and Intel integrated graphics. That meant you had access to the power of a discrete GPU when you needed it, but you could also use integrated graphics when it was sufficient for the task.

Switchable was well received and well reviewed when we launched it, and we knew we were on to something. But for all the praise we got for switchable graphics, when our team actually used the computers that had the feature, we found several flaws. Most of the flaws of switchable graphics had to do with the user experience. Namely:

• You had to actively switch between the discrete GPU and integrated graphics, and many times people forget to do so. Ugh, which mode am I in?
• You had to close all your applications to allow the computer to make the switch… kind of a pain.
• You had to reboot your system to make the switch, although we solved that issue in the current generation of switchable graphics, still a pain.
• State of the art switchable graphics takes several seconds to switch and the screen goes blank and flickers… not a deal breaker, but far from perfect.

We knew we could do better. The user experience must be one where things just simply work. You don’t want to know which graphics device is in use at any one time. You don’t want to have to decide which device to use for a given application. You want Optimus. There, problem solved.

After just a couple of weeks since its introduction, the Tesla Bio Workbench community pages have been a hive of activity with more than 10,000 visitors in a matter of days. Today we added more codes to the program, specifically codes focused in the field of bio-informatics, such as BLASTP and HMMER, giving an even wider range of scientists and researchers the ability to increase the pace of their research using GPUs. Bio-Informatics codes are used heavily in pharmaceutical companies and in genomics research.

One of the codes, MUMmerGPU, a code focused on the compute-intensive task of DNA sequencing, comes out of University of Maryland, who was also today appointed a CUDA Center of Excellence (CCOE).

To be a CCOE, a university must demonstrate extensive use of GPU computing and the CUDA programming model in its research and teaching efforts across multiple science and engineering departments. University of Maryland has been one of the strongest supporters of GPU Computing since its introduction:

As the weeks pass, the situation does not seem to be getting remarkably better in Haiti. I think aid organizations are going to be there for a very long time. At this point, our employees’ and fans donations to the Red Cross (and the NVIDIA Foundation’s match) are being converted into supplies that are still making their way by plane each day.

While it seems strange to talk about rebuilding at this point, there are visionaries on the ground in Haiti this second thinking about how to rebuild it into a stronger and more sustainable country. As part of our match of employees’ donations, the Foundation also donated $50,000 to Architecture for Humanity, a non-profit collaborative of architects that design homes and community buildings for low income cities. Their emphasis is on environmentally-sound building principals and the recipients of the buildings play an active part in choosing the design of their future home. Our donation will fully fund a new community center, and a short term recovery center that would house technical professionals who are in-country working on various initiatives for the government and NGOs. The community center will offer Haitians valuable computer skills that can be used to secure jobs in the digital economy.

NVIDIA’s Events Marketing team has found a way to contribute even more to Haiti by asking our ecosystem of business customers and gamers to help. For the upcoming DICE show, marketing will donate $5 for each unique business card it receives at its booth, and we’ve partnered with LAX LAN on their case mod charity raffle. Proceeds from both shows will go to purchase computers for the new community center.

This morning we’ll be having an event in San Francisco, showcasing how CUDA - NVIDIA’s parallel computing hardware architecture - is making dramatic differences across a wide range of industries. We’re having some of our key partners and customers demo CUDA-accelerated products and technologies, ranging from 3D ultrasound for fetal diagnostics to home movie editing. We’ll be hearing from Adobe, Siemens Medical, Muvee, Cyberlink, Agilent, MotionDSP, and Kaspersky Lab. Follow us @gpucomputing on Twitter for more information, and pictures, about how these and other companies are pushing technology boundaries with the GPU.‬‪‬‪‬‪

Excitement over GTX 480 and GTX 470, our upcoming next-gen GPUs, has been building over the past couple of months as eager gamers and hardware enthusiasts get ready to read initial reviews and see early benchmarks of the cards. Here at NVIDIA, we know that the next generation GeForce graphics cards will mark a milestone in the history of gaming. So we’ve decided to celebrate that with a look back at some of the biggest gaming evolutions through our History of Gaming Challenge. We’re giving you a chance to brush up on your gaming trivia and win exciting prizes like some of the best games, graphics cards, a 3D Vision kit or two, and if you’re lucky…one of the very first GF100 boards to be created!

Here’s how it will work. We’ll post a new challenge here every Wednesday. Don’t worry about checking this post every minute though- we’ll also notify you on Twitter when the newest challenge has been posted. Now-to have a shot at winning, you need to follow a couple simple rules:

1. Follow NVIDIAGeForce on twitter
2. Be one of the first 100 people to tweet an answer
3. Answer correctly, including #nvidiaHOG in your tweet
4. Be 13 or older and a resident of the US or Canada. Full terms and conditions Here.

Are you ready for Challenge #1? The prize this week is a 3D Vision kit! Here it is…

Here’s a short post Shawn Worsell, senior product manager for PSG/Quadro FX mobile graphics solutions, just has published on Dell’s Inside Enterprise IT blog about their new Precision M6500 mobile workstation, featuring our new Quadro FX 3800M. Wanted to share this with our nTersect blog readers as well. Enjoy the full post after the jump!

The GeForce team was shocked and saddened to hear that Chris “ChrisRay” Arthington succumbed to pneumonia on January 28th. He was only 27.

3D graphics enthusiast Chris Arthington

Chris was a longtime graphics enthusiast, nZone moderator, and frequent contributor on a number of forums including NVnews, SLIzone, EVGA, Rage3D, Anandtech, and others. He loved graphics technology and had a sincere desire to help people by sharing information, trouble-shooting, and reporting issues to NVIDIA. As a member of our user group, he helped us evaluate new hardware and advocated for improvements like advanced anti-aliasing and improved multi-GPU scaling. His Twitter (ChrisRaySLI) bio states: “Goal: Help all Nvidia users by improving their experience with Nvidia hardware.” He did that in a big way.

The graphics community and the team at NVIDIA have lost a great friend and a tireless advocate, and he’ll be sorely missed.

NVNews.net created a site to honor and remember Chris. Please go here to the memorial page and post your reflections. NVIDIA is providing support to his family, and we’ll pay tribute to Chris at GeForce LAN events and other activities throughout the year.

Co-written by Dr. David B. Kirk, NVIDIA Fellow, and Dr. Wen-mei Hwu of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, it’s designed to teach how to program within a massively parallel environment and includes many case studies. The book utilizes CUDA C as well as OpenCL. Portions of the content have been part of the curriculum at universities around the world.

Experts in the field are already weighing in with comments:

David Patterson of U.C. Berkeley (and co-author of Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach) writes: “For those interested in the GPU path to parallel enlightenment, this new book from David Kirk and Wen-mei Hwu is a godsend.”

Hanspeter Pfister of Harvard says: “David Kirk and Wen-mei Hwu are pioneers in this increasingly important field, and their insights are invaluable and fascinating. This book will be the standard reference for years to come.”

NVIDIA’s Chief Scientist Bill Dally comments: “I look forward to seeing the transformation of computing as students are inspired and guided to master GPU computing by this book.”

If you are a professor, student, researcher, programmer, or simply a person who’s passionate about computing, this book will be of interest.

For more info, go to Elsevier or Amazon.

This post is an entry in The World Isn’t Flat, It’s Parallel series running on nTersect, focused on the GPU’s importance and the future of parallel processing. Today, GPUs can operate faster and more cost-efficiently than CPUs in a range of increasingly important sectors, such as medicine, national security, natural resources and emergency services. For more information on GPUs and their applications, keep your eyes on The World Isn’t Flat, It’s Parallel.

Every time I hear about some little boy or girl who has a life-threatening disease, I get reenergized to promote the opportunities that computers offer in helping reduce disease and finding cures for human ailments. The exciting new developments on this frontier have to do with using parallel computing to speed up research and create the breakthrough discoveries that will save lives.

Finding new drugs is a complex and laborious task. Biochemists have to try millions of compounds before they can figure out which ones are effective against a particular virus or bacteria or which cause a desired reaction in the human body. To narrow the field, scientists use automated tools for high-throughput screening. But at some point, they have to test the remaining biochemical compounds in time-consuming manual experiments in a “wet” laboratory. (See our recent piece on the Tesla BioWorkbench for more information on how we’re helping researchers in the life sciences use GPU computing in their work.)

Last week, we announced a goal to match $60,000 in donations for Haiti relief made by our employees and the NVIDIA community. As of Tuesday, we have collected $80,000 in donations and will match the entire amount to organizations focused on helping Haiti recover and rebuild from their recent disaster.

A total of $77,000 was donated on behalf of our employees and $3,000 by the NVIDIA community. We plan to honor our goal of matching $10,000 in community donations, so there is still an opportunity for you to get involved.

A portion of the NVIDIA Foundation’s donation will go to the Red Cross to assist in recovery efforts. The remainder will be donated to Architecture for Humanity to assist in rebuilding efforts. That donation will be used to wholly fund a community center that will initially serve as a recovery center and later convert to an economic development center so Haitians can learn new job skills and search for employment opportunities.