Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference, Day 2

Day Two: The Emerging Companies Summit

Nvidia’s GTC is three parts: first, we were introduced to research and soon we will look at programming with CUDA, C++ and other languages just now made available for the GPU.  But now we are looking at a few really successful companies that have already leveraged GPU computing to produce extraordinary products.  The main speaker was Nvidia’s Vice President Jeff Herbst and he had 3 primary guests presenting their ongoing success stories to the 450 attendees in the audience.  The audience had grown by 150 over last year.

Jeff Herbst stressed Nvidia’s “GPU ecosystem” where they all work to support each other.  His first guest was Laurent Gil, CEO of Viewdle.  This company is the first to be able to organize mass photos and especially video successfully by finding individual faces out of millions of images far more quickly and reliably than can be done with the CPU.  The more successful a search is of a particular person, the easier it is to find more of that same person so as to even generate automatic slide shows.

How fast?  Well, he said you can organize 2,000 photos in just a few minutes!  He discussed his licensing plan to software houses and said some of his face recognition software will be free for some recognition and will be made available to consumers next year.  He stressed that the Nvidia GPUs that consumers already own, will greatly speed up his program over just using the CPU.  Of course, you can also expect this technology to be coming to an airport security camera near you.

He was followed by Tarek El Doktor, CEO of Edge 3 Technologies, the premier gesture recognition company.  They use a very cheap solution – two non-synchronized web cams that allow the computer to “see” and recognize gestures.  The demonstration he gave was impressive.  Again he stressed the importance of leveraging the GPU that is already in consumer’s PCs to make his program far more effective and swift.

He further went on to say that although the program used 70,000 lines of code, its footprint was as small as an optical mouse’s and it only used 3% of the CPU – it depended on GPU processing.  He speculated that 1,000 times more processing power would allow the computer to read facial gestures including emotions and that computers would be able to “see” within five years by mean of AI trained “unsupervised learning”.  Exciting times indeed!

Finally we had a talk by MirriAd’s CEO and then it was followed by a full panel discussion including the previous two guests, Steve Perlman of OnLive (Games on Demand) and analyst Rob Enderle, CEO of Enderle Group, for another hour.  MirriAd digitally embeds advertising into any video content, as though it was always there. This advertising allow content owners, whether film, TV or online – including social media like Facebook and YouTube – to effectively monetize their assets.  It is incredibly high volume work requiring placement of hundreds of ads a day.  This requires GPU processing and the real time demonstrations of placing ads into existing media seamlessly, was very natural and quite impressive.

Now it was a choice between attending a Motion DSP presentation or hitting the exhibits.  I picked viewing the exhibits and later got to talk with the MotionDSP people.  They have a fascinating product that cleans up shaky video very quickly using CUDA-enabled GPUs (the fastest; they will also run on the CPU-only, albeit much more slowly).  This editor wishes he had this product right now for many of the video and stills that cannot otherwise be used.  Of course, we will get the MotionDSP press kit and review it thoroughly for you in a later review.

Unfortunately, this editor had a HW malfunction and had to run all over San Jose for a replacement – finding it finally at Fry’s and then racing back through traffic to the conference for a 5 PM semi-private meeting with Nvidia’s Drew Henry, the general manager of the GeForce business unit and with Jason Paul, the GeForce product manager.  Here we discussed Fermi architecture, Ion, Tegra and Nvidia’s plans for the future.  We will detail this discussion in the last part of this series when we cover Fermi architecture and Nvidia’s new direction.  However, here is an image of the reverse side of new Fermi GPU:

The meeting began at 5 PM and was supposed to end in 1/2 to one hour.  It was actually over just before 6:30 PM and we appreciated the extra time that the Nvidia officials spent with us answering our questions.  We will have those details for you in the next installments of our GTC coverage.  Well, it was now getting dark and an exciting and jam-packed Day 2 of Nvidia’s GTC had concluded.

We saw how Nvidia’s revolution in GPU computing is exciting scientists, researchers and new companies. This left me looking forward to the last day of the GTC where we sit in on CUDA programming and learn to use Nvidia’s new debugger tool for the GPU – Nexus –  as well as to delve deeper into Microsoft’s Visual Studio, which now supports the GPU.  For the last day, we see scheduled, Richard Kerris of Lucas Films and a “fireside chat with Jensen and Peddie”.  We did not miss any of this, including visiting many of the emerging companies exhibits. We shall have it covered here for you tomorrow including the details of the new Fermi architecture

Before we go, as a tease, we would like to leave you with a couple of images.  First of all, we found out from a very good source that Nvidia actually killed Dumbledore.  Details are in the next installment.

And could this possibly be Jensen, Nvidia’s CEO and co-founder doing some kind of weird 3-D dance in the exhibit room?  Yes indeed!  We explain tomorrow.

Mark Poppin

ABT Senior Editor

Please join us in our Forums

Become a Fan on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

For the latest updates from ABT, please join our RSS News Feed

Join our Distributed Computing teams

• Folding@Home – Team AlienBabelTech – 164304
• SETI@Home – Team AlienBabelTech – 138705
• World Community Grid – Team AlienBabelTech