Monday, August 9, 2010

NVIDIA Gets $25M For High Performance GPU Computing

Santa Clara-based NVIDIA said today that a team led by the firm has received $25M from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), to develop GPU (graphical processing unit)-based high performance computing technology. According to NVIDIA, the four-year research contract was awarded under DARPA's Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) program, and will go to developing exascale supercomputers 1,000 times more powerful than today's fastest supercomputers. The team also includes Cray Inc., Oak Ridge National Laboratory and six U.S. universities. Recently, firms have been using GPU technology--standard, graphical processing units--to accelerate processing of highly parallel software operations, rather than using CPU power for those tasks. The technique allows many more operations per second to be applied to intensive computing algorithms.