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GTC Day 3 kicked off with a fireside chat between Jen-Hsun Huang and Forbes national editor Quentin Hardy, covering everything from fundamental changes in the computer industry, to skills needed by the next generation of entrepreneurs, to products that will be hot for the holidays. Sebastian Thrun, robotics pioneer at Stanford and distinguished engineer at Google, closed the show with a passionate closing keynote. Much happened in between. In this video, senior VP Dan Vivoli recaps the day, and the entire show.

Hardware nvidia

Apps. Four little words that are dominating more and more our tech lifestyle. Our last round-up of the week starts with two infographics about the importance of the app universe, one by Meet the Boss and the other from Flowtown. The results of a survey about online degrees, brought by E-Learners, is our third pick, and from Credit Loan comes a look at Property Taxes in America. Closing today’s selection, a serious warning to all those energy-drinks hardcore consumers, made by Term Life Insurances.

Read more…

Graphics, Science design, economy, environment, infographic, infoviz, Visual Loop, visualizations

NVidia has just announced the winners of the “One To Watch” Awards for the year, naming five companies to watch that are innovating in the GPU space.  The winners are:

• Empulse
• Scalable Display Technologies
• Scaleform
• Visisonics
• Universal Robotics

Congratulations to the winners!

Graphics, Hardware, Science gtc

GTC2010 is winding down (I’m in the closing keynote right now).  Shown above is a “Wordle” of every single session name.  I removed a few odd words like “Tutorial” and “Companies”, but check it out and you can pretty quickly see what was going on this week.

Wordle – GTC2010 Session Titles.

Graphics, Science gtc, wordle

Over at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), they’ve got a new machine online named ‘Longhorn’ that boasts all of the usual numbers in HPC: 210TB local file system, 13.5TB of Memory, and 2048 compute cores. (256 nodes).  What makes it a bit different is that it also has 2 GPU’s on each node, offering up 512GPUs of visualization and GPU-computing power, making it 597 Teraflops.

“Longhorn is an impressive machine,” Fogal said. “Using 256 GPUs, we volume rendered data larger than two terabytes, which is among the largest-ever published volume renderings. Such renderings would normally require hundreds of thousands of CPU cores otherwise. Our success was in major part due to the large number of GPUs available, in addition to TACC’s helpful staff that aided us in accessing them for our visualization work.”

But that’s not all.  In addition to having the horsepower, it’s got the sexy UI to bring it to the masses.  Available to users is the ‘Longhorn Visualization Portal‘, a web-based VNC client that connects with their queueing system to provide direct visual access to a complete desktop, enabling you to run any application you want: CUDA or Visual.

via HPCwire: Researchers Generate Compelling Computational Results on TACC’s Longhorn Visualization Cluster.

Hardware, Science hpc, longhorn, tacc

LaptopMag has posted a video of the plenoptic lens technology that Adobe demonstrated during the GTC2010 keynote, showing a single snapshop of a girl in a field and how they are then able to dynamically change the focus in the after the photo.

First, the lens’ optics atomize the picture in thousands of tiny versions of the scene, all different from each other, at different angles and positions. When you add these lenses to your DSLR camera, the sensor would capture a huge grid of images made of all these little images. The effect is similar to the eyes of a fly.

Then, the software can take this grid and combine the versions into a single one. Using a simple slider, you can change the focus of the image in any way you want, picking any plane you desire to be in perfect, crystal-clear focus.

Gizmodo mistakenly says Adobe “invented” the technology, and simply calls the whole system “Plenoptic”.  In reality, Plentoptic is a type of lens also known as a polydioptric which is actually a multitude of lenses working together (refer to the Wikipedia article) and the technology that Adobe was demonstrating was first developed and demonstrated by Stanford back in 2009.  Adobe’s contribution was in moving it to GPU-compute, so that the internal processing comes down from hours to fractions of a second.

via ENHANCE! (How Adobe Will Let You Take Perfectly Focused Images Every Time).

Hardware adobe, camera, gtc

Over the last few weeks, I’ve received several press released from the former VFX house ‘RhinoFX’.  First off, they changed their name to the much cooler sounding ‘Gravity‘.

As part of the Gravity rebranding, the company has devised a new brand theme that poses the question, “What Kind of World Do You Want?”  Building on this theme, Gravity has developed a new website, www.GravityWorld.com, which highlights the company’s strength in digital and its continued commitment to cutting-edge commercial and feature film effects.

That alone was neat, but I passed it over.  Maybe I shouldn’t have.  Since then, they’ve opened a new west-coast studio.

Gravity (formerly known as RhinoFX), the recently re-launched and rebranded international visual effects, design, creative content and brand communications company, has expanded into the West Coast, establishing a new Los Angeles office which is fully integrated with the company’s New York and Tel Aviv operations.

But they didn’t stop there.  They then brought out industry heavyweight Bob Samuel as Executive Producer and Chief Marketing Officer.

“Gravity is taking a giant step forward by streamlining the company’s three groups, and I’m excited to be a part of it,” said Samuel. “The rebranding and investment in integration for digital, commercials, features, and strategy allow Gravity to take on more ambitious and international projects.”

And then today they announce that they’ve promoted Shemi Levi to Chief Digital Officer, bringing his expertise in virtual worlds and other digital media.

Levi will be responsible for global digital leadership for all Gravity clients. In his new role, he will oversee and implement the newly rebranded company’s Digital offering and complement the company’s other key groups – Features and Commercials. He joined the recently re-launched company as Vice-President of Digital in early 2009.

If you’re not familiar with the new Gravity, formerly RhinoFX, they used to be a VFX firm based in New York and Tel Aviv, with work like “The Sopranos”, “Sex and the City”, and “Salt” under their belt, among many others.  The new expansions and hires come at a surprising time, during the recession and with many VFX houses crumbling under economic pressure and studio demands.

Sounds like Gravity may have a good chance of pulling through the VFX industry quagmire, and being one of the few studios to actually grow during the downtime.

Graphics gravity, rhinofx, vfx

Sony has a new ad hitting Europe television viewers right now, showcasing the joy of watching Soccer in 3D.  It shows Brazilian star Kaká as he traverses the feed, building speed and strength, before kicking a goal so powerful the goal explodes.  It’s cliche, and kinda fun to watch, but is the beginning of something possibly far more annoying.

The ad is airing on both 2D and 3D networks, but on the 2D networks you see the same 3D ad.  You see both fields, as though it was projected via a dual-polarized display system, with overlays like “Do not adjust your set” and “This is 3D TV”.  At the end, it concludes with “Maybe it’s time to buy a 3D TV”.

I personally think it’s a bad idea for Sony to adopt the goal of annoying users into submission, but I guess Sony’s never been one for making consumer-friendly decisions (MemoryStick anyone?).  Guess we’ll have to wait a few months and see if sales show any difference.

London’s One Of Us Uses Baselight To Take Advertising Into A New Dimension – SHOOTonline.

Hardware commercial, sony, television

A new image taken with the powerful HAWK-I camera on ESO’s Very Large Telescope at Paranal Observatory in Chile shows the beautiful barred spiral galaxy NGC 1365 in infrared light. NGC 1365 is a member of the Fornax cluster of galaxies, and lies about 60 million light-years from Earth.

NGC 1365 is one of the best known and most studied barred spiral galaxies and is sometimes nicknamed the Great Barred Spiral Galaxy because of its strikingly perfect form, with the straight bar and two very prominent outer spiral arms. Closer to the centre there is also a second spiral structure and the whole galaxy is laced with delicate dust lanes.

This galaxy is an excellent laboratory for astronomers to study how spiral galaxies form and evolve. The new infrared images from HAWK-I are less affected by the dust that obscures parts of the galaxy than images in visible light (potw1037a) and they reveal very clearly the glow from vast numbers of stars in both the bar and the spiral arms. These data were acquired to help astronomers understand the complex flow of material within the galaxy and how it affects the reservoirs of gas from which new stars can form. The huge bar disturbs the shape of the gravitational field of the galaxy and this leads to regions where gas is compressed and star formation is triggered. Many huge young star clusters trace out the main spiral arms and each contains hundreds or thousands of bright young stars that are less than ten million years old. The galaxy is too remote for single stars to be seen in this image and most of the tiny clumps visible in the picture are really star clusters. Over the whole galaxy, stars are forming at a rate of about three times the mass of our Sun per year.

While the bar of the galaxy consists mainly of older stars long past their prime, many new stars are born in stellar nurseries of gas and dust in the inner spiral close to the nucleus. The bar also funnels gas and dust gravitationally into the very centre of the galaxy, where astronomers have found evidence for the presence of a super-massive black hole, well hidden among myriads of intensely bright new stars.

NGC 1365, including its two huge outer spiral arms, spreads over around 200 000 light-years. Different parts of the galaxy take different times to make a full rotation around the core of the galaxy, with the outer parts of the bar completing one circuit in about 350 million years. NGC 1365 and other galaxies of its type have come to more prominence in recent years with new observations indicating that the Milky Way could also be a barred spiral galaxy. Such galaxies are quite common — two thirds of spiral galaxies are barred according to recent estimates, and studying others can help astronomers understand our own galactic home.

via : An Elegant Galaxy in an Unusual Light

Science astronomy, eso

OpenCV is a well known computer vision library, used in fields like autonomous vehicles and industrial robotics.  NVidia has announced today that the next version, coming out in Spring 2011, will have a nice 5x-10x performance bump thanks to upcoming CUDA integration.  This has huge advantages for fields like autonomous vehicles.

“My research lab uses OpenCV extensively in our autonomous vehicles,” said Sebastian Thrun, professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University. “CUDA GPU acceleration for OpenCV provides my research team an instant performance bump which is critical in our research. OpenCV and CUDA will dramatically increase what is possible with computer vision in our autonomous vehicles.”

For many applications, this has the potential to take them from the 1-2 frames per second rate into ‘realtime’ space.  Not only that, but it has the potential to replace what currently takes racks of equipment (which adds problematic weight and power requirements) with simply a few GPUs or something like a Tesla-S.

via NVIDIA Newsroom.

Science cuda, opencv