14 DAY TRIAL // The University of Utah has been recognized as a CUDA Center of Excellence, announced NVIDIA Corporation and the institution. This appointment marks the beginning of an important collaboration between the two organizations. This is the second CUDA Center of Excellence to be recognized after the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign last month. CUDA technology is used in over 50 schools and universities as included in their Computer Science curriculum, which proves that the parallel computing using many-core architecture has a great impact on the high-performance computing industry.
"The synergy of graphics combined with computational horsepower provided by NVIDIA GPUs and the CUDA programming environment provides incredible opportunities in science, industry and commerce," stated Dr. Steven Parker, adjunct professor of computer science at the University of Utah and principal research scientist at NVIDIA.
During the last 40 years, distinguished members of the University of Utah's faculty and alumni have contributed to graphics innovations and sustained pioneering companies such as Adobe, Evans & Sutherland, Pixar and Silicon Graphics. The collaboration is meant to ensure the persistence of this industry-changing work, and to deliver new technologies that will leverage the processing power of the GPU.
"Often before a great discovery there is the creation of a new tool or a tool that is used in a different way than before," said Chris Johnson, director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute at the University of Utah. "GPUs and the algorithms and software that they use are today's tools and with them we are entering a golden age, where scientific computing is going to truly change the way we do science and medicine."
CUDA technology will be used by the University of Utah across three faculties, namely the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute, the Center for the Simulation of Accidental Fires and Explosions (CSAFE), and the School of Computing. SCI has become a leader in visualization, scientific computing, and image analysis, and is focused on developing new scientific computing techniques, tools and systems to be used in biomedicine, science, and engineering. Known until 2000 as the Department of Computer Science, The School of Computing has a background of important contributions to research and industry. CSAFE is one of the five Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) centers that the Department of Energy has, and it's focused on increasing the safety of dangerous material transportation and storage.
"The worlds of scientific computing and computer graphics owe a great deal to the University of Utah and those who have passed through its halls," said David Kirk, chief scientist at NVIDIA. "CUDA technology has the potential to truly transform industries, as we have already seen in fields such as medicine, geophysics and finance. With a school of Utah's caliber incorporating it into their curriculum and across many of its research facilities, I am personally very excited to see what advances can be made."
The GPU technology provided through this partnership will be used by the CUDA Center of Excellence at the University of Utah for researches in scientific applications like seismic data processing and visualization, MRI and diffusion tensor image reconstruction, cardiac electrical wave propagation simulation, combustion and fluid dynamics simulation, as well as few other projects in large-scale scientific visualization.