The Official NVIDIA Blog

Two of the hottest trends in information processing today are cloud computing and general purpose computing on GPUs. Both provide users with vast amounts of computing power, great flexibility, and very low costs compared to traditional solutions. Now they are coming together in what we can call CUDA in the cloud.

Cloud computing has become a somewhat vague term because of a tendency to use it to refer to any sort of network-based service, but I am using it in its original sense of the supply of on-demand computing through the provision of virtual servers. Leaders in this business include Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing, Rackspace, or Microsoft Azure. If you need an extra server for a Web site or database, just contact your cloud computing provider and you can be up and running in minutes.

Been waiting to upgrade your notebook?

The time has come.

With new GeForce 400M Series GPUs launching this week at IFA Berlin, a flood of new designs are launching now and over the next couple months. The list of OEMs contains a few names you might recognize – Asus, Acer, Toshiba, Samsung, Dell, Sony, Lenovo, MSI, LG, and more.

Expect a range of form factors from the big and powerful, to the small and svelte. Check out the glamour shots below for a better idea of some of the just-announced notebook models.

Today at the IFA Berlin show in Germany, we announced our new GeForce 400M Series GPUs for notebooks. For full specs and details about the 400M check our product page, here. You’ll be able to experience GeForce 400M Series GPUs in the next-generation of Optimus and 3D Vision notebooks from top global OEMs including Acer, Asus, Dell, Lenovo, Samsung and Toshiba among others. As the first notebook GPUs designed with the award-winning NVIDIA Fermi architecture, GeForce 400M Series GPUs were built from the ground-up to support Microsoft DirectX 11.

NVIDIA Product Manager, Mark Aevermann demos some of the notebook choices you’ll have for the upcoming holiday season, in this week’s NVIDIA in a Minute video. The Optimus notebooks featuring GeForce 400M Series GPUs offer great performance for HD Video, High-Res Photos, Accelerated Web, and Next-Gen Gaming. The competition? Not so much.

Not to be outdone, new 3D Vision notebooks from Acer and Asus are also debuting at IFA. The Asus G53Jw 15” and G73Jw 17” notebooks feature the new GTX 460M – ideally spec’ed for keeping your friends close and your enemies closer in Mafia II 3D. The Acer Aspire 5745DG features the GT 425M and is aggressively priced to move into your living room so you can enjoy your favorite Blu-Ray 3D movies or US Open tennis streamed in 3D.

The Emerging Companies Summit – which kicks off in less than three weeks in San Jose, Calif. – is shaping up to exceed expectations.

An impressive lineup of 60 emerging companies will describe their latest technology in the fields of robotics, computer vision, gesture recognition, medical imaging, high performance computing, and stereoscopic 3D.

Execs from some of the world’s leading tech companies, including Adobe, Cisco, Google, IBM and Microsoft, will evaluate the companies’ technology and business strategies in panel discussions.

As a technologist and technology journalist for over twenty years, I’ve been a witness or participant to many different game-changing technologies. Some end up changing the way we look at computing, while others just seem to fizzle out and disappear after a while.

I have little doubt that GPU computing will fall into the former category. That assessment is based on the fact that the performance of GPUs on many important scientific and engineering problems overshadows just about any other method of computation, save a supercomputer. But GPUs are typically less than the cost of CPUs, and have a place in any engineer’s desktop workstation.

Nothin’ like finishing off the summer with a loud explosion. So, we are off to PAX West in Seattle this week to Crank it Up with the West Coast crowd. PAX East in Beantown was such a blast that we had the urge to do it again on the left coast.

For those planning on attending, hang with us at booth #3404 on the main floor and get hands-on gameplay on GeForce powered rigs. 3D will be everywhere, single screen, projectors, surround, laptops. And, we will have a 3D Photo Booth in the South Lobby. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen yourself in the 3rd Dimension - swing by.

We're also running a scavenger hunt at the show, so while you're at our booth be sure to pick up your Scavenger Hunt card.  You'll get to go on a tour of the floor, seeing GeForce gear and games at our partners' booths. 

If you're in the business of developing breakthroughs in visualization and imaging, then you won't want to miss the GPU Technology Conference next month. With over 250 technology sessions presented by industry luminaries, there’s a wealth of information being shared, including tracks devoted to exploring new techniques in the graphics and visualization space involving ray tracing, image processing, video processing and medical imaging.

For content production, attendees can learn about how mental images' iray interactive ray tracing is being leveraged in applications to streamline product development, and how the OptiX application acceleration engine can be integrated into your own application. There are several great sessions on ray tracing and other rendering techniques, including:

UPDATED: Wednesday, Sept. 1, 11am pdt

One of my favorite things in life is tearing things apart and putting them back together to see how they work. Over the past couple of years, I have taken that to a whole new level – by converting two automobiles from gas to electric.

It got started about 5 years ago when I acquired an ugly purple 1975 Porsche 914 – specifically because I wanted to do a conversion:

Heads up. This morning we announced our keynote speakers for the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) 2010.

On Day One, which is Tuesday, Sept. 21, our CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, will give the opening keynote. If you've ever had a chance to see him speak, you know it's always a great experience. We won't share the details of his talk now, but come hear it for yourself.

Our Day Two keynote will be given by Klaus Schulten, a computational biologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His will highlight the major discoveries made using the computational microscope, including viewing protein folding, translating genetic codes in cells and harvesting solar energy in photosynthesis. In addition, he will review his pioneering research on cell disruption and viruses, including the H1N1 virus. His H1N1 research uses GPU-based computational microscopes to determine how the virus reacts to drug treatment and to investigate possible methods of combating it.