Harvard Becomes a CUDA Center of Excellence

Santa Clara, California-based NVIDIA announced yesterday that the Harvard University had been recognized as a CUDA Center of Excellence. According to the graphics chip maker, the recognition is highly justified, given the University's commitment in teaching GPU computing and its integration of CUDA-enabled GPUs for a host of science and engineering research projects. Prior to the CUDA Center of Excellence honors, the Harvard University received a $2M grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the development of the GPU-enabled computational science.

“With interest in the CUDA architecture spreading rapidly across the Harvard campus and the lively scientific landscape in Boston, there has never been a better time to announce this partnership,” said Hanspeter Pfister, Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science in Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and director of Visual Computing at the Harvard Initiative in Innovative Computing. “This generous gift from NVIDIA will provide excellent learning opportunities for Harvard students, accelerate our research and expand the use of GPUs for computing in science and other advanced applications.”

The Harvard University is already using the graphics processing unit to find solutions to a series of questions. For example, in one project, called Connectome project, the GPU is being used to decode the intricate structure of the human brain, a quest that has been a priority for the scientific community for a long time now. Also, another project that takes advantage of the computing power of the GPU is the MWA telescope project, which is meant to discover the origins of the universe. Aside from the aforementioned, the GPU power is being used for other projects as well at the Harvard University.

Back in mid 2008, NVIDIA announced the first CUDA Center of Excellence, an honor that has been granted to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which also received a donation of $500,000 for the development of parallel computing facilities and continuation of its research programs.