7 Highlights of GTC 2013 – Day 1 of 4

John MelonakosEvents Leave a Comment

AccelerEyes is out in force at GTC. We ended up with 10 of our engineers and sales staff here onsite. I collected feedback from the team to learn what people enjoyed the most from today’s activities.

Here are 7 of the highlights we’ve collected from our team on the first day of GTC 2013:

  • Will Ramey of NVIDIA kicked off GTC with a tutorial on the CUDA ecosystem. He talked about the three different approaches to getting GPU acceleration:  1) Libraries, 2) Compiler Directives, and 3) Programming Languages. He talked about how libraries, if you can find one for your application (hint, hint),  are the best of the 3 options, because you get great performance and you don’t have to write low-level code yourself.
  • James Malcolm of AccelerEyes gave an excellent tutorial on CUDA Image Processing with ArrayFire and NPP. Half-way into the presentation, someone pulled the fire alarm and the 100+ crowd evacuated the building. To our surprise, the room filled back up to capacity once we were allowed back in the building!
  • Ina Yosun Chang made an awesome comment on Twitter about the fire alarm, “And… ArrayFire is so hot it’s burning down the San Jose Convention Center.”
  • The GTC Poster Session – A hive of GPU energy accelerated by 8 free drink coupons for attendees!
  • Creative Consultants showed us a preview of their 18 megapixel stereo virtual reality system, named VR Grotto. Super cool and definitely a must see for GTC attendees in the exhibit hall.
  • Cliff Woolley of NVIDIA gave a tutorial driving home the APOD cycle for systematic optimization: Assess, Parallelize, Optimize, Deploy.
  • 29 tutorials – A massive amount of learning today. It felt like a university campus walking around with all these note takers and people trying to get real acceleration work done.

Bonus Highlight:  Dinner with Strangers – GTC attendees meet new people over dinner. Great fun and an excellent way to learn what’s really going on in GPU computing.

Don’t discount Monday’s at GTC. It was awesome!

We look forward to the keynote tomorrow, to exhibitions, and to 3 more days of GPU energy.

What highlights did you enjoy the first day at GTC 2013?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *