Clemson Receives Computer Graphics Research Center Designation

CLEMSON, SC – August 31, 2010 – Clemson University has been designated a Compute Unified Device Architecture Research Center by NVIDIA Corp., an international developer and manufacturer of integrated circuits and computer graphics processing units.

The centers conduct research with Compute Unified Device Architecture — CUDA — which is a parallel computing architecture developed by NVIDIA. CUDA underpins NVIDIA’s graphics processing units.

Only nine institutions globally have achieved the status, which is conferred based on research and development in computer graphics. Johns Hopkins University and Northeastern University are the only other American universities to receive the designation. The other institutions are in Australia, Ireland, Norway, Singapore, Spain and the Czech Republic.

Clemson University was selected as a CUDA Research Center based on the vision, quality and impact of research leveraging CUDA technology, said David Luebke, director of research at NVIDIA Corp. We are pleased to be a partner in the outstanding research taking place at Clemson and look forward to future research activities.

NVIDIA provides member institutions free computing equipment, pre-product release of certain technology, inside advice from designers and tutorials tailored to specific institutional needs.

The equipment donations that accompany this designation are extremely valuable to our research, said Robert Geist, a professor in Clemson’s School of Computing. As an example, we have a photon transport model which requires 30 minutes of execution time on a high-end CPU. On a high-end NVIDIA CUDA platform, we can execute the same model in two seconds.

Turning minutes into seconds or, equivalently, turning hours into minutes dramatically expands our horizons in computational research, Geist said.

Along with Geist, computing professors Don House and Jerry Tessendorf will be principal investigators for the CUDA research center.

Tessendorf, winner of the Academy Award for Technical Achievement in 2008, recently was named director of Clemson’s Digital Production Arts program, a graduate program for professionals in the film, video and gaming industries.

Research in Clemson’s CUDA Research Center will focus on real-time modeling and rendering of natural phenomena and visualization of large datasets. The goal is to produce larger-scale, higher-performance and improved image quality in computer graphics, ultimately developing computer models that are both closer to their physical bases and are perceptually optimized for human viewing.