Clemson & NVIDIA (K->E)

Clemson University announced that it has been designated a CUDA Research Center by NVIDIA Corp., an international developer and manufacturer of integrated circuits and computer graphics processing units. Only nine institutions globally have achieved such a designation, which is conferred based on research and development in computer graphics. Johns Hopkins University and Northeastern University are the only other American universities to receive the designation. The other institutions are in Australia, Ireland, Norway, Singapore, Spain and the Czech Republic.  Clemson and the other centers conduct research with CUDA — common unified device architecture — which is a parallel computing architecture developed by NVIDIA for graphics processing units.  A complex photon transport model which requires 30 minutes of execution time on a high-end CPU can be executed on a high-end NVIDIA CUDA platform in two seconds.  Computing professors Robert Geist, Don House and Jerry Tessendorf will be principal investigators for the CUDA research center.  Tessendorf, winner of the Academy Award for Technical Achievement in 2008, recently was named director of Clemson’s Digital Production Arts program, a graduate program for professionals in the film, video and gaming industries.  The complete press release can be found here.