Tokyo Institute of Technology Selected as Japan's First CUDA Center of Excellence

SANTA CLARA, CA--(Marketwire - April 8, 2010) -  NVIDIA Corp. today announced that Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) has been named Japan's first CUDA Center of Excellence, recognizing its pioneering activities in education and research involving parallel computing. 

Tokyo Tech is the 10^th CUDA Center of Excellence, joining other international research institutions, including Cambridge University, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Harvard University, University of Maryland, National Taiwan University, Tsinghua University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Tennessee and University of Utah. More than 300 universities worldwide teach the CUDA^™ programming model within their curriculum. 

"Tokyo Tech's reputation has been built on its world-class research," said Satoshi Matsuoka, division director of research infrastructures of the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center (GSIC) at Tokyo Tech. "We pride ourselves on a number of research publications and awards using GPUs, as well as advanced courses that leverage the GPU and the CUDA programming model. As a CUDA Center of Excellence, we look forward to advancing the state-of-the-art in petaflops scale parallel computing and beyond, using our GPU-enhanced heterogeneous supercomputer to solve challenging computational problems of national and global importance."

Tokyo Tech's Global COE CompView program seeks to establish new scientific methodologies focused on computation and to train scientists to succeed in the rapidly changing world of computing. Last November, Tokyo Tech GSIC was the first supercomputing center to achieve a Top 500 ranking with GPUs. Its TSUBAME 1.2 supercomputer uses 170 NVIDIA^® Tesla^™ S1070 GPU Computing systems.

"Tokyo Tech is a globally important university that educates engineers and developers in a country renowned for innovation," said Andy Keane, general manager, Tesla business at NVIDIA. "Tokyo Tech's appointment as the first CUDA Center of Excellence in Japan will enable it to share its parallel computing knowledge and, by utilizing CUDA, enable students and researchers to contribute to future advances in computing."

A Tokyo Tech research group, led by Professor Takayuki Aoki, recently developed ASUCA, a fully GPU-optimized version of a weather forecasting model and program. The Japan Meterological Agency had been developing the code for fast, sophisticated simulation of meteorological phenomena such as typhoon and cloud formations. They achieved up to an 80X performance increase over a highly-optimized CPU implementation, as well as over 12 Teraflops performance using nearly 600 GPUs on TSUBAME 1.2, sufficient for the fast and accurate simulation of typhoons.

Further revolutionary results using GPUs are expected, including real-time simulations of tsunamis, inversions in Earth's magnetic field, 3D structures of proteins and the mass behavior of humans in emergencies.

Go here for more information on the Tokyo Tech CUDA Center of Excellence and here for more general information on NVIDIA's CUDA Center of Excellence program.

About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) awakened the world to the power of computer graphics when it invented the graphics processing unit (GPU) in 1999. Since then, it has consistently set new standards in visual computing with breathtaking, interactive graphics available on devices ranging from portable media players to notebooks to workstations. NVIDIA's expertise in programmable GPUs has led to breakthroughs in parallel processing which make supercomputing inexpensive and widely accessible. Fortune magazine has ranked NVIDIA #1 in innovation in the semiconductor industry for two years in a row. For more information, see www.nvidia.com.

Certain statements in this press release including, but not limited to, statements as to: the benefits, features, impact, performance and capabilities of CUDA architecture and NVIDIA products and technologies; NVIDIA's expertise; and the benefits associated with being a CUDA Center of Excellence are forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to be materially different than expectations. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include: our reliance on third parties to manufacture, assemble, package and test our products; development of more efficient or faster technology; design, manufacturing or software defects; the impact of technological development and competition; changes in consumer preferences and demands; customer adoption of different standards or our competitor's products; changes in industry standards and interfaces; unexpected loss of performance of our products or technologies when integrated into systems as well as other factors detailed from time to time in the reports NVIDIA files with the Securities and Exchange Commission including its Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2010. Copies of reports filed with the SEC are posted on our website and are available from NVIDIA without charge. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and speak only as of the date hereof, and, except as required by law, NVIDIA disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.

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NVIDIA Corporation
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ahumber@nvidia.com