NVIDIA Application Lab at JSC

During ISC 2012, Forschungszentrum Jülich and NVIDIA announced a multi-year collaboration. Together, the two organizations launched the "NVIDIA Application Lab" which is based at JSC. The primary goal of the lab is to broaden the application basis for GPGPUs (General-purpose computation on graphics processing units) and to provide support for the optimization of applications using such devices. Enabling the efficient use of parallel multi-GPU architectures will be the key focus of the lab, as will the analysis of new features of next-generation hardware (such as the upcoming Kepler GK110) and programming models. The lab will use the JUDGE cluster (Jülich Dedicated GPU Environment) at JSC, which comprises 206 nodes with 2 NVIDIA GPGPUs per node.

The lab will work on applications from different research areas including astrophysics and astronomy, biology, elementary particle physics and materials science. It will initially concentrate on a pilot application from Forschungszentrum Jülich in the field of medicine and neuroscience. The group headed by Prof. Katrin Amunts (INM-1, Structural and Functional Organization of the Human Brain) plans to extend the use of GPGPUs for their JuBrain project. Within this project, a large number of histological brain sections will be scanned and rendered to create a high-definition, structurally accurate and realistic model of the human brain.
(Contact: Prof. Dr. Dirk Pleiter)

from JSC News No. 206, 13 July 2012