May 15, 2012, GPU Technology Conference, San Jose, CA—Jen-Hsun Huang founder and CEO of NVIDIA opened the conference with updates on GPUs and Cuda, and announcements on technologies and partners.

Cuda is continuing to grow since its introduction in 2008, when they had 150k downloads, 1 symposium, 4k papers, and 60 universities taught the language. This year, over 1.5M downloads and 35 symposia happened. 560 schools teach the language and there were 22.5k papers about uses and applications for Cuda. These numbers show increasing adoption to reflect the fact that all computers are Cuda capable. The language is moving further into science and there are many applications and topics for its use.

The first announcement was on a new architecture and product called Kepler that was in development for 3 years. This device integrates graphics and computing for high performance and a high feature count. The parts will be first released in the GTX690 and will include dual Kepler chips which host 3000 GPUs plus an SLI bridge. The whole subsystem will be in a dual vapor enclosure. (see figure)

Nvidia GeForce GTX-690 Graphics Card

Now, when you drive your video, it includes a pair of radiators and a fan.

 

The Kepler architecture is described here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/nvidia-kepler.html .

Another new technology created for GPU computing and display, is the ability to virtualize the GPU called VGX. The VGX technology enables cloud-based operations of accelerated graphics through new hardware and software. See: http://www.nvidia.com/object/vdi-desktop-virtualization.html for the details.

NVIDIA is using their technology to power the GeForce Grid. A cloud-based gaming platform that enables high performance gaming on any computing device, PC, tablet, etc. The technology requires a extremely healthy Internet connection to provide real-time graphics. See: http://www.nvidia.com/object/cloud-gaming.html

After introducing the hardware, they brought in their partners in cloud and accelerated graphics solutions. The newest partners include Citirx, ILM, and Cisco.