NVIDIA: from gaming graphics to High Performance Computing

A few weeks ago a group from NVIDIA was out visiting Dell. Their Tesla series of GPU cards are the primary cards that are used in our newly announced C410X expansion chassis. Filling up the C410X with NVIDIA cards and attaching it to a server can bring about ginormous increases in compute performance, helping to make HPC and scaled-out deployments wicked fast.

So how did NVIDIA get from rendering graphics for first person shooters to creating GPUs that accelerate modeling, simulation, imaging, signal processing, etc? Listen to the interview below with Geoff Ballew of NVIDIA’s Tesla unit and learn. :)

Some of the ground Geoff covers:

  • NVIDIA’s not just for gaming any more
  • A few years ago found that their graphic chips were getting a lot of raw math horsepower, so they added a few extra features into the chips and built a suite of software so that the graphic cards could be used for general computation.
  • How hard was it to convince HPC customers to take NVIDIA seriously in the compute arena?
  • What kind of performance gains are they seeing?
  • The accompanying software development tools and ecosystem of partners
  • The shift in NVIDIA’s workforce and culture as they’ve gotten into general compute processing – united by their love for GPUs :)

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

About the Author: Barton George