Bangalore, December 24, 2013— The Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay is to be the first CUDA Center of Excellence (CCOE) in the country, Visual Computing leader NVIDIA and the Institute jointly announced last week. (CUDA is a parallel computing platform and programming model developed by NVIDIA).
IIT-B already houses three CUDA Research Centres -- and now as a CCOE, IIT Bombay will utilize equipment, grants and resources provided by NVIDIA to support research projects in a variety of fields, including climate and ocean modeling, bioinformatics, circuit simulation, computer/GPU architecture, computer graphics and vision, computational fluid dynamics and molecular fluid dynamics, explained Professor P. S. V. Nataraj, of IIT-B's Systems and Control Engineering Group.
Multiple engineering and science departments at IIT Bombay, including, aerospace, bio-science, chemistry, chemical, climate studies, computer science, electrical, mathematics, mechanical engineering, physics, and systems and control would leverage the Centre -- but the institute would run it as a national centre of excellence and a hub of academic and research supercomputing, throwing open its facilities to users nationwide, Prof Nataraj added. The first national workshop on GPU and applications has been planned at IIIT-B in February 2014.
On hand to join in the NVIDIA-IIIT-B announcement was the 'father of CUDA' himself -- Ian Buck, Santa Clara (CA, US)-based Vice President of NVIDIA's Accelerated Computing Business unit. The TeslaK40 acccelerator ( ten times faster than the fastest available CPU today) as well as the latest CUDA6 platform have been optimized for parallel processing and Big Data Analytics, Buck told IndiaTechOnline in a special briefing last week.
“Compared with other major regions around the world, India is experiencing the fastest growth in new CUDA developers,” said Vishal Dhupar, NVIDIA's Managing Director, South Asia, “Our collaboration with IIT Bombay and over a dozen institutions across India reinforces NVIDIA’s commitment to establishing a strong ecosystem that will advance the country’s research across a range of scientific and engineering fields.”
He cited IIT Delhi's unfied weather forecasting project; The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) partnership with the $ 1 billion global radio telescope project in the field of real time signal processing and the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) work on GPU enabled computational fluid dynamics code for the Paras 3D rocket simulator as examples of Indian innovation in GPU based computation.