NVIDIA announced that National Taiwan University has been named as Asia’s first CUDA Center of Excellence (press release below). The university earned this title by formally adopting NVIDIA GPU Computing solutions across its research facilities and integrating a class to teach parallel computing based on the CUDA architecture into its educational curriculum. As the computing industry rapidly moves toward parallel processing and many-core architectures, over the past year, NVIDIA has worked to offer tomorrow’s developers and engineers education on the best tools and methodologies for parallel computing. In addition to working with over 50 Universities worldwide that are actively using CUDA in their courses, NVIDIA developed the CUDA Center of Excellence Program to further assist universities that are devoted to educating tomorrow’s software developers about parallel computing. (Press Release)

GPU4Vision is a project founded by the Institute for Computer Graphics and Vision, Graz University of Technology dealing with fast computer vision algorithms for tasks like basic image processing, segmentation, motion, stereo etc. On the GPU4Vision website you can take a look at the project’s latest scientific publications, watch demo videos of algorithms and even download and evaluate some of them on your own PC. (GPU4Vision – Website)

From the press release:

SANTA CLARA, CA & URBANA, IL JUNE 30, 2008 NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), the worldwide leader in visual computing technologies, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) today announced that UIUC has been named as the world’s first CUDA Center of Excellence. In addition to the appointment, NVIDIA has donated $500,000 to UIUC for the development of parallel computing facilities and the continuation of its research programs.

“The CUDA Center of Excellence program rewards schools that truly embrace the concept of parallel processing as the future of computing”, said Dr. David Kirk, chief scientist at NVIDIA. “Schools receiving this accreditation integrate the CUDA software environment into their curriculum to help their students harness the capabilities of these new parallel processing architectures. As one of the country’s leading schools in this field, I am personally delighted to appoint UIUC as our first CUDA Center of Excellence.”

The Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group at UIUC was one of the first research groups to leverage the parallel architecture of the GPU to accelerate their research in the field of computational biophysics. They have successfully accelerated NAMD/VMD, a popular parallel molecular dynamics application that analyzes large biomolecular systems. It is hoped that this donation will aid this group, and others at the university, to further their work and speed them down the path to great discovery.

(Complete Press Release)

The GAMMA research group at UNC Chapel Hill (led by Profs. Dinesh Manocha and Ming Lin) uses GPUs for Voronoi computations, collision detection, penetration computation and collision response, motion planning, and more.