Looking Back at NVIDIA’s GPU Tech Conference – Their Future as a Software Company

This editor was privileged to be on hand for NVIDIA’s GTC earlier this month where the second annual Emerging Companies Summit, held from Sept. 30 to Oct. 2, brought together 475 attendees in San Jose, California and featured presentations by 60 start-up companies from 15 countries, discussing how they utilize graphics processing units (GPUs) to deliver innovative solutions in areas ranging from cloud computing and computer vision to gaming and image processing.  This GTC conference was reported on in detail for AlienBabelTech readers, Day 1, Day2 and Day 3.

One of the most interesting interviews with Nvidia’s co-founder and CEO Mr. Jen Hsun Huang, happened during the GPU Technology Conference event and can be found here.  Here Mr. Huang (aka Jensen by just about everyone) describes NVIDIA’s future as a software company and what will be driving their growth.  “We create more core technology for visual computing that [sic.] any other company in the world. . . . NVIDIA is a integrated complete visual computing and parallel computing solution technology company.”

Jensen compared Nvidia somewhat to Apple as a software company that makes money by selling hardware. “In the future software is the most important thing, anyone can make chips, it is really expensive but anyone can do it. The hard part is to inspire people to create amazing things. We have software, systems, architecture, tools, compilers, and languages, whatever it takes.”

Well, today, five of the sixty start-ups that participated in NVIDIA’s recent Emerging Companies Summit (ECS) were today awarded by NVIDIA the title “Ones To Watch” for their exceptional promise, by a three-member panel.  Since it launched its GPU Ventures program in March 2009, NVIDIA is actively investing in new companies and offering others some pretty high-grade expertise, all in the name of building what they call their GPU ecosystems.

According to Jeff Herbst, vice president of business development at NVIDIA: “Our goal is to educate, nurture, support and inspire developers and emerging entrepreneurs to continue to develop applications for the GPU platform and we are truly pleased to recognize these five distinguished companies for their outstanding work. The ecosystem consists not only of the emerging companies that we hope to directly support through programs like the ECS, but also the VCs that fund these companies, the partners that work with them, and the customers that purchase products from them.”

‘One To Watch’ awards given to top five ECS companies are based on: technology value, market opportunity and impact and ‘wow’ factor.  Awards include $15,000 in legal services from Cooley Godward Kronish LLP. The companies that received the awards, which were based on technology value utilizing the graphics processing unit (GPU), market opportunity and potential impact include:

• IQ Engines, of Berkeley, Calif., recognizes and labels images, monetizing photos by tying them to relevant retailers.

• Milabra, of New York City, uses a multi-point visual recognition platform to target advertising based on visual content instead of text.

• MirriAd, a London-based start-up that seamlessly embeds advertising into video content, as if it were always there.
• Ubitus, of Taipei, is a software platform provider for fixed mobile convergence applications.
• Visuvi, of Redwood City, Calif., enables image search without any text required.

In that same interview, Jensen said,  “2/3 of our revenue come from games but 2/3 of our profit comes from Quadro workstations, you know NVIDIA is the words largest workstation technology provider, our market share is about 95% in this market, every single company, every single country, every single car, oil, plane, train, shoes, etc… uses Quadro technology, this is the highest market share of any workstation company in the history of making but the workstation is not very large but is very important.”

Here is a good example of this:

Open Inventor by VSG Leverages NVIDIA Technology to Greatly Improve Quality and Performance When Visualizing Massive Data Sets

NVIDIA and Visualization Sciences Group (VSG), a leader in 3D development solutions for the oil & gas industry, announced today that the newest release of the Open Inventor 3D Graphics Toolkit will employ the NVIDIA(R) CompleX(TM) scene-scaling acceleration engine, enabling the visualization and manipulation of huge data sets required for energy exploration.

Open Inventor 8.1 by VSG integrates the CompleX engine, enabling advanced 3D applications to fully scale across the multiple graphics processing units (GPUs) powering NVIDIA Quadro(R) Plex visual computing systems. This technology turns a single workstation into a visual supercomputer, providing engineers and scientists an immersive, ultra-high resolution experience capable of handling extremely large visual scenes, such as those used in seismic interpretation and other oil & gas-related research.

“This innovative package makes it possible to manipulate and access massive scenes in a practical, efficient way,” said Jean Bernard Cazeaux, CEO of VSG. “An application powered by Open Inventor 8.1 with CompleX running on a Quadro Plex system delivers a smoother, faster frame rate, and offers a much more interactive experience for engineers and geophysicists when viewing a seismic dataset of 100 million triangles. Without it, the performance would be unbearably slow.”

“The value of NVIDIA application acceleration engines integrated into software like Open Inventor and powered by Quadro professional solutions is incredibly significant to the oil and gas industry,” said Jeff Brown, general manager, NVIDIA Professional Solutions Group. “Geophysicists can perform large-scale visualization faster and with greater precision — meaning they can discover new energy reserves more rapidly and cost effectively than ever before.”

Open Inventor is an object-oriented, cross-platform 3D graphics toolkit for developing industrial-strength, interactive, 3D graphics applications using C++, .NET or Java. Its easy-to-use application programming interface, extensible architecture and large set of advanced components provide developers with a high-level platform for rapid prototyping and development of 3D graphics applications.

NVIDIA application acceleration engines like CompleX, which are available at no charge, are highly optimized software modules enabling developers to supercharge their products with high-performance capabilities. When combined with NVIDIA Quadro solutions, they unleash advanced creative and investigative possibilities for professionals.

Quadro Plex solutions deliver breakthrough levels of productivity and capability, giving geophysicists, scientists, engineers, and other technical professionals the visual supercomputing power they need to tackle today’s biggest challenges.

Product Information

VSG and NVIDIA will be demonstrating Open Inventor at the Society of Exploration Geophysicists International Exposition (SEG) at the George R. Brown Convention Center, Houston, TX, in the VSG booth #2310, Hall C, October 26th through 29th.

For more information about Open Inventor 8.1 by VSG, please visit http://www.open-inventor.com.

For more information about NVIDIA, Quadro Plex, and NVIDIA Application Acceleration Engines, please visit: http://www.nvidia.com/quadro.

Energy Giant Hess Explores Benefits of Virtualization, NVIDIA SLI Multi OS Technology on HP Workstations

In related news, NVIDIA announced today that Hess Corp., a leading global independent energy company, is using HP Z800 workstations outfitted with NVIDIA(R) Quadro(R) graphics processing units (GPUs) and NVIDIA SLI(R) Multi-OS technology to investigate reducing IT costs while increasing productivity for geosciences professionals.

Leveraging virtualization technologies from NVIDIA, Parallels and others, the HP Z800 workstation delivers the speed and expandability that oil and gas professionals can fully utilize to tackle their biggest challenges.

“In our constantly challenging and highly competitive business environment, cost-effective, flexible, powerful IT solutions are critically important,” said Jeff Davis, manager, Technical Computing, at Hess. “We’re examining how the HP Z800 workstation, bolstered by the technologies incorporated in it from NVIDIA, can help us with our ongoing exploration efforts.”

NVIDIA SLI Multi-OS enables Hess to run both Microsoft Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux simultaneously on a single workstation.

Using Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (Intel VT-d) hardware acceleration, SLI Multi-OS allows Hess to directly assign NVIDIA Quadro graphics processing units (GPUs) to virtual machines — a breakthrough capability for graphics-intensive applications.

Parallels Workstation 4.0 Extreme is the first high-end workstation virtualization solution to offer users near-native performance for graphics-intensive applications. The product leverages the key virtualization technologies enabled by NVIDIA and Intel to deliver highly performing virtual machines for the most demanding visualization applications.

“Instead of running applications on different machines, and moving data back and forth over the network, SLI Multi-OS radically streamlines users’ workflows and instantly enhances productivity,” said Jeff Brown, general manager, NVIDIA Professional Solutions Group. “We believe Hess’ use of fully virtualized workstations will make their employees more efficient, while lowering the total cost of ownership.”

HP and NVIDIA will be demonstrating the HP Z800 workstation powered by Quadro professional graphics solutions and SLI Multi-OS technology, Intel VT-d and Parallels Workstation 4.0 Extreme, at the Society of Exploration Geophysicists International Exposition (SEG 2009) at the George R. Brown Convention Center, Houston, TX, in the HP booth, #631, October 26th through 29th.

The SLI Multi-OS capability is available on the NVIDIA Quadro FX 3800, Quadro FX 4800, and Quadro FX 5800 graphics solutions and supports selected combinations of Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Linux operating systems.

For more information on NVIDIA Quadro solutions, please visit: www.nvidia.com/quadro.  Interesting times indeed and a clear direction for NVIDIA.  We will keep our readers updated as NVIDIA’s Fermi GPU changes from a graphics into a general processing unit right before our eyes.   And of course, we will let you know how it performs in PC gaming.

Mark Poppin

ABT Senior Editor

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