Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference, Day 2

This editor has returned home from Nvidia’s big event, exhausted but strangely energized after three full days at their big GPU Technology Conference.  Although it is a 7 to 8 hour drive each way with no sleep the night before, and much sleep lost attempting take in much of it, I still felt excited just like I was a kid at Disneyland again. However, this time it is much more important than Tech-Disneyland as Nvidia has started a brand new revolution in the computing industry.  My only suggestion for Nvidia to improve GTC 2010, is to make next year’s conference longer.

If you want to check out the jam-packed schedule, or read anything and everything to do with the GTC or the just-released Fermi GPU architecture, Nvidia’s own site has a wealth of information available from the conference.

The first installment of this short series covering Nvidia’s GTC, Day One was published here.  Their three-in-one GPU technology conference used an entire floor at the impressive luxury Fairmont San Jose Hotel in beautiful downtown San Jose, California for 3 days – September 30 through October 2.  We are continuing to give you our impressions of this event for day 2 (now) and day 3 (tomorrow). For the final part of this series (this week), you can expect a more polished summary of Fermi architecture when we review all of our notes, transcribe all of our audio and the forty-plus gigabytes of full HD-HR video that we shot, and finally make sense of everything that we observed.  We will also post our own video and links to full discussions of what we covered at Nvidia’s GTC.  We also had a couple of semi-private press conferences with Nvidia officials that we will cover for you.  We thank them for their time and their extraordinary attention to our questions as we help our readers to understand their new revolution in GPU computing.

Nvidia’s GTC was not about hardware.  We only saw a single production mock-up of the coming Fermi (Tesla division) in Jensen’s hand at the general press conference yesterday.  The Fermi production silicon is so new, it is still hooked up to wires in Nvidia’s box – completely functional as we saw demonstrations actually using it – but not yet ready for public presentation.

The Nvidia officials that we spoke with, all insisted that Fermi will ship this year – and besides excelling at GPU computing, it will also be the single fastest GPU – period!  Rumors floating around the GTC whispered that Fermi would be 1.6 to 1.8 times faster in general gaming than GT 200; but those are just rumors that are neither substantiated nor confirmed by those who really know.  Nvidia is not yet ready to talk about gaming performance of the GeForce Fermi F100 GTX other than to say, “it will be the fastest”.

In the above picture (left), the production mock-up is of the new Fermi Tesla – their GPU professional computing card. We did get confirmed that this is the first time that one of Nvidia’s code names has actually become the marketing name for it.  Previously, “GT 200” was Nvidia’s internal codename for GPU Tesla ver. 2.0.  What was unusual was that the codename for the Tesla architecture then crossed over to become the name of their newest third brand, Tesla.  Nvidia’s Tesla products are intended for the high performance computing market. Their lack of ability to output images to a display is the primary difference between Tesla products and Quadro workstation and GeForce consumer video cards. The main function of Tesla products are to help with simulations, large scale floating-point calculations and image generation for professionals, using Nvidia’s GPU programming language, CUDA.

Fermi features several big innovations over GT 200 (Tesla) architecture that are essential to greatly improving GPU computing – up to eight times in some cases!:
• 512 CUDA cores (twice as many)
• NVIDIA Parallel DataCache technology
• NVIDIA GigaThread™ engine
• ECC support

However, this GPU Technology Conference is all about software and the companies and the individuals that will be using it to program for a much expanded general computing architecture in Fermi.  We saw languages such as C++ and Fortran newly riding on top of CUDA – Nvidia’s own open source language which is the GPU programming equivalent of x86 instructions for the CPU.  It was invented by Ian Buck – the genius programmer who wrote Brook for his Master’s thesis.  He also sat down with ABT in a small meeting and shared information about programming for Fermi.  He is a very personable and yet down-to-earth individual who obviously loves his work as do all of the Nvidia employees that we met.  One cannot fake the pride, enthusiasm and excitement they all show for their company and its newly released GPU and new programming and debugging tools.  And the attendees and presenters were just as enthusiastic at the new software releases. It was contagious.

ABT’s attendance at this conference has turned into a short series on Nvidia’s GPU computing and what this conference is really all about.  It is really a computing revolution that started as part of Nvidia’s vision a relatively few short years ago.  It is Nvidia’s revolution to make the GPU “all purpose” and just as important as the CPU in computing.  We saw this genesis begin with last year’s Nvision08 and expand and grow into the GTC, only one short year later.

As we can see from our images, the conference was physically large and absolutely jam-packed with multiple sessions occurring at the same time.  It reminded me of college, with everyone hurrying to the next lecture.  All along the second floor were over 100 posters that showed what Nvidia’s GPU revolution had already accomplished and what was being planned.  Everywhere we were reminded of the extreme advantages of the GPU’s parallel processing contrasted with the CPU’s serial processing; advantages in cost, energy-saving and time.  Of course, the first poster belonged to Nvidia and reminded everyone to conserve and to think “green” (in every way).

Nvidia also knows how to treat their press very well.  They gave out a very nice press kit and were continually helpful to this reporter.  The food supplied at the conference was very good with several choices available – including vegan.