I’m settled into the press pit at the NVidia GPU Technology Conference Keynote hall, where the screens are unreasonably large and the microphones are deafeningly loud. Currently listening to “Uprising” by Muse, and waiting for it to begin. I’ll be updating this post as new information comes along, so stay tuned!
- 8:42 – I don’t know who makes NVidia’s playlists but I need to find them.. Now listening to “Electric Eel” by MGMT. Seems several press photographers are using HDR cameras, listening to the rapid-fire shutterclicks.
- 8:44 – Don’t forget you can watch along (if you have the ability) at NVidia’s livestream of the keynote.
- 8:45 – Seems everyone gets a pair of Dolby3D Passive Polarized glasses upon entry. I guess 3D will be on the agenda.
- 8:50 – Beginning to notice a theme.. “Uprising”, “Keep on rocking in the free world”… Hrrm.
- 8:56 – Before we begin, enjoy some “really kewl demos” in 3D..
- Technical Snafu there.. sorry folks. Had to disable the Twitter Tracker temporarily.
- 9:11 – Ubisoft HAWX2 Demo, in 3D. NVidia has 3 focus areas: Professional (Quadry), Computational (Tesla), Personal (Tegra/GeForce).
Remainder after the break.
- 9:13 – Talking about CUDA. Medical Imaging, Drug Design, Seismic Imaging, Automotive Design, Product Development, Options Pricing, Astrophysics.
- 9:14 – The “3rd Pillar of Science”, High Performance computing..
- 9;16 – The “Computer Architecture is Back” paper from Patterson et al, January 2007. “New CW: Power Wall + Memory Wall + ILP Wall = Brick Wall”. Math is Free, Power is expensive.
- 9:19 – CUDA Examples by Tony Tamasi
- 9:20 – L-system with a few primitive and high tesselation.. “Endless City”, in 3D. Over 1000 light sources, high procedural tesselation complexity.High resolution displacement maps put a 500x compexity over a very low resolution polygonal model.
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- 9:23 – 1-million voxel volume rendering simulation.. Two crash test dummies, one blowing smoke, and one fanning it, full CFD simulation with shadows & volume rendering effects.
- 9:26 – a Triple simulation – a Lighthouse with weather, realistic water splashing on shore, moving debris.
- 9:28 – A Measure of Success: CUDA SDK Downloads 293k in 2009, 668k in 2010. GTC Submissions was 67 in 2009, 334 in 2010.
- 9:29 – Last year, a single OEM for Tesla. This year, 9 OEMs with 19 SKU’s around the world.
- 9:31 – Computational biology & chemistry have a “GPU Buzz”. SuperComputing, SIGGRAPH loaded with CUDA papers.
- ANNOUNCEMENT: CUDA-x86 (PGI).
- 9:35 – Talking about Matlab. Among engineers, Matlab ranks up with Excel & World of Warcraft.
- 9:37 – The MAtlab Parallel Computing toolkit, uses MPI.
- ANNOUNCEMENT: Matlab now supports CUDA-gpus in the Matlab Parallel Computing Toolkit.
- ANNOUNCEMENT: Multi-GPU AMBER 11
- 9:43 – The Amber11 JAC benchmark: 8 Fermi GPU’s can simulate 52ns a day. 192 Quad-Core CPU’s can simulate 46ns.
- 9:48 – Dr S. Subbiah of ANSYS takes the stage.
- 9:51 – Discussing 757 Brake design, done by BF Goodrich. FAA mandates that the brakes be able to take the entire plane from 200mph to 0 in 5000 feet, all simulated by ANSYS. The entire system is approximately 100 pieces, broken town to 1 million discrete elements, a system of approximately 12 million equations to solve.
- 9:54 – An initial benchmark of ANSYS Mechanical showed a 2x speedup when using Tesla. For ANSYS customers, the important part is not in the faster simulations, but in the ability to run more simulations in their fixed timeframes.
- ANNOUNCEMENT: CUDA Accelerated ANSYS Mechanical R13
- 9:58 – Ken Pimental (Autodesk) and Michael Kaplan (mental images) take the stage.
- ANNOUNCEMENT: Mental Images iRay coming to 3dsMax
- 10:18 – Tesla coming to IBM BladeCenter, Cray XE6, and T-Platforms TB2
- 10:19 – Adobe’s David Selesin and Todor Georgiv take the stage.
- 10;22 – Adobe shows a Plenoptic Lens
- 10:26 – The plenoptics microlens array can take hundreds or thousands of pictures simultaneously, each one with various parameters, then be reconstructed in various ways with software (change focus, change camera position).
- 10:28 – From Jen-Hsun, “Up to now, Digital Photography has just been digitizing a previously analog process”. Now, it’s moving into a new world of capturing images and video.
- 10:30 – An amazing demo of reconstructing a stereo pair from the lens images, then dynamically adjusting the focus and convergence.
- 10:34 – Technical goof leaves Jen-Hsun and the heart surgeon on stage.
- 10:35 – Using GPU accelerators, they can imagine a beating heart in real-time, analyze the motion, and use it as a baseline to correct robotic surgical tools so that the surgeon & robot are operating an an “effectively” still heart while it remains beating.
- 10:43 – Upcoming Products: Kepler in 2011, 5DP GFlops per watt, Maxwell in 2013 – 15 DP GFlops per watt. Plotting GFLops per watt!!
- 10:44 – There is a power wall, a hard limit. Performance Per Watt = Performance.
- 10:45 – Kepler based on 28nm process. A few billion R&D in it.
- 10:46 – Maxwell. Maxwell will be 16x Tesla Fermi.
- 10:49 Wrapping up..
- 10:51 – 250 Hours of sessions this year
- 10:51 – NVidia has created a short 18-minute documentary of 3 different breakthroughs in medicine powered by GPUs
