The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is launching a 13-week seminar series that will focus on emerging applications for parallel computing. The Need for Speed Seminar Series will feature world-class applications experts and researchers who will discuss what increased computing performance means for their fields. The series will bring together hardware engineers and software developers who require parallel processing to create faster and superior applications. Speakers will help forecast breakthroughs enabled by the rapid advances in computing performance per dollar, performance per watt, or storage capacity provided by Moore’s Law.

David Kirk, NVIDIA Fellow, will kick off the series with a special keynote on January 28. Following that, the Need for Speed series will be held at 4pm CT every Wednesday until April 29 at the UI’s Coordinated Science Laboratory. Seminars will also stream live over the internet and speakers will take questions from both in-house and online audience members. To learn more about the series, or to view the live seminars, please visit the Need for Speed seminar web page.

(Editor’s Note: this news was submitted after the talk occurred.)

Slides from the 2007 AstroGPU conference, held at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton last November, have been posted to the AstroGPU Website.

UNC’s Professor Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., who coined the term “Computer Architecture”, received the 2005 ACM/IEEE Computer Society Eckert-Mauchly Award for outstanding contributions to the field of computer and digital systems architecture. In his award acceptance speech, Dr. Brooks stated that GPUs are “…very powerful scientific computers installed in many homes… I think exploring that design space and its utilization… is one of the most exciting areas in computer architecture today.” (Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. 2005 Eckert-Mauchly Award acceptance speech. Streaming Video Links)

This talk by John Owens of UC Davis discusses trends in GPU architecture and their current and potential uses for high-performance computing. The invited talk was given at the Eighth Annual Workshop on High-Performance Embedded Computing (HPEC 2004). (GPUs: Engines for Future High-Performance Computing)

During the Advanced OpenGL Tutorial at the 2004 Game Developers Conference in San Jose, California, Mark Harris of NVIDIA will give a short talk on GPGPU for games. The OpenGL tutorial will be held Tuesday, March 23 from 10am until 6pm. Slides for this talk, “GPGPU : Beyond Graphics”, as well as other talks from the OpenGL Tutorial are available at this link.