NVidia started their business by building graphical accelerators for video games and 3D designers. In 2007 they announced CUDA, a unified parallel computing architecture. 5 years ago it seemed that only crazy people could do some vital calculations on hardware designed for video games. Now building High Performance Computing accelerators is becoming core business for NVidia.
This year GPU Technology Conference (by the way, ELEKS was Silver Sponsor of GTC 2012) has shown us how important HPC business is for NVidia. They make lots of efforts to make it more and more usable by developers. They make GPUs more energy-efficient, they pack them with many new features, and they make them faster and faster. Check outstanding keynote by Jen-Hsun Huang for more details.
Oleh Khoma, Head of HPC unit at ELEKS was a speaker at GTC 2012. Here is his presentation:
Effective HPC system is so much more than just GPGPU. Real-world applications often need to stream large amounts of data from across system boundaries to the dozens of worker nodes in a most scalable and efficient way. They usually require storing huge amounts of data, scheduling of computation jobs, monitoring of system health and results visualization. Having first-hand experience in design, development and implementation of end-to-end HPC solutions, our engineers will share their experience on some of the pitfalls to avoid and things to consider when planning your next HPC system that works.
