Archive notice: This article was originally published on July 2, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Nvidia and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) today announced that the institution has been named the world’s first “CUDA Center of Excellence.” CUDA stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture and is currently the only C programming environment for graphics processing units (GPUs). The technology developed by Nvidia accelerates scientific and technical calculations many times over.
As one of the first research groups to do so, UIUC’s Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group uses the parallel architecture of GPUs to advance its research in computational biophysics more quickly. Supported by calculations performed on Nvidia graphics processors, NAMD (Nanoscale Molecular Dynamics) and VMD (Visual Molecular Dynamics) enable significant advances in simulating complex molecular systems. In addition to naming UIUC a CUDA Center of Excellence, Nvidia has donated $500,000 to develop its parallel-computing facilities and continue its research programmes.
Universities that also want to become CUDA Centers of Excellence must teach CUDA and use it in multiple research laboratories. In return, Nvidia supports the institution through donations and equipment, including the creation of a GPU computing cluster. A year ago, UIUC received 32 QuadroPlex Model 4 systems from Nvidia, with a total of 64 GPUs for a 16-node CUDA technology cluster. It is administered by the University of Illinois’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and is valued at $800,000.
