NVIDIA Corporation (Santa Clara, CA) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC; Urbana, IL; http://illinois.edu/index.html) announced that UIUC has been named as the world's first CUDA Center of Excellence. In addition to the appointment, NVIDIA has donated $500,000 to UIUC for the development of parallel computing facilities and the continuation of its research programs.
NVIDIA CUDA technology is a C-compiler and software development kit (SDK) for developing computing applications on graphics processing units (GPUs).
The Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group at UIUC was one of the first research groups to leverage the parallel architecture of the GPU to accelerate their research in the field of computational biophysics. They have successfully accelerated NAMD/VMD — a popular parallel molecular dynamics application that analyzes large biomolecular systems. It is hoped that this donation will aid this group, and others at the university, to further their work and speed them down the path to great discovery.
Universities wishing to become CUDA Centers of Excellence must teach a CUDA class and use CUDA technology in their research, usually across several labs. In return, NVIDIA supports the school through funding and equipment donations, including help to set up a GPU computing cluster. The appointment of UIUC follows on from the donation last year of 32 QuadroPlex model 4 systems, containing 64 GPUs for a 16-node CUDA technology cluster. The cluster, that has an $800K value, is administered by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at UIUC. Plus, NVIDIA's inaugural NVISION 08 conference will be held August 25-27, 2008 in San Jose, CA.
