CSIRO joins new CUDA program

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has been selected as a member of NVIDIA’s international network of research centres as a part of its new Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) program.

The CUDA program seeks to advance general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPUs) and includes a CUDA Certification Program with CUDA Research Centres and Teaching Centres.

In being selected for the program, the CSIRO joins the already selected Research Centres including, John Hopkins University in the Unites States, Nanyan University in Singapore, Technical University of Ostrava in the Czech Republic, and SINTEF (Norway).

“To be involved in NVIDIA’s CUDA Research Centre Program, which is designed for institutions that embrace GPU computing across multiple research fields, is a great honour for CSIRO," CSIRO group executive for Information Sciences, Dr Alex Zelinsky, said in a statement. “We’re excited to be in such good company.”

The CSIRO’s GPU cluster, launched back in November 2009, as previously reported by <i>Computerworld Australia</i>, features 256 GPUs, and is the first of its kind in Australia

The cluster speeds up data processing by allowing a computer to massively multi-task through parallel processing, resulting in the CSIRO GPU cluster being one of the world’s fastest computers.

NVIDIA director of research, Dr David Luebke, said the CUDA Research Center program is designed to recognise and encourage the use of GPUs for scientific and high performance computing.

“CSIRO will gain access to the latest developments in GPU computing and become part of a wider community of organisations with GPU facilities, sharing information and ideas,” Dr Luebke said in a statement.

“We’re using the GPU cluster to speed up projects like modelling nuclear analysers, running 3D X-ray and CT image reconstruction, measuring uncertainty in complex environmental models and understanding biomechanical processes like human swimming,” the CSIRO's platform leader of computational and simulation sciences, Dr John Taylor said.