GTC 2015 Deep Learning and OpenPOWER

Another great GTC meeting. NVIDIA does this right! The most interesting aspects for me this year were the talks on “Deep Learning” (Artificial Neural Networks) and OpenPOWER. I have some observations and links to recordings of the keynotes and talks. Enjoy!

NVIDIA CUDA GPU computing on a (modern) laptop

Modern high-end laptops can be treated as desktop system replacements so it’s expected that people will want to try to do some serious computing on them. Doing GPU accelerated computing on a laptop is possible and performance can be surprisingly good with a high-end NVIDIA GPU. [I’m looking at GTX 980m and 970m ]. However, first you have to get it to work! Optimus technology can present serious problems to someone who wants to run a Linux based CUDA laptop computing platform. Read on to see what worked.

Install CUDA and PGI Accelerator with OpenACC

I’m going to walk you through a basic install and configuration for a development system to do CUDA and OpenACC GPU programming. This is not a detailed howto but if you have some linux admin skills it will be a reasonable guide to get you started. We’ll do a basic NVIDIA GPU programming setup including CentOS 6.5, CUDA development environment and a PGI compiler setup with OpenACC. The most interesting part may be the OpenACC setup. OpenACC is a relatively new option for GPU programming and allows for a directive (pragma) based coding model.

GTC 2014 Brief Recap — content links

I had the pleasure of attending the NVIDIA Graphics Technology Conference ( GTC ) last week. Wonderful conference! If you have any doubts about the quality of the conference you are in luck. They have most of the content on-line, you can check it out yourself …