Wednesday, January 28th 2009
NVIDIA Names Stanford's Bill Dally Chief Scientist, VP of Research
NVIDIA Corporation today announced that Bill Dally, the chairman of Stanford University's computer science department, will join the company as Chief Scientist and Vice President of NVIDIA Research. The company also announced that longtime Chief Scientist David Kirk has been appointed "NVIDIA Fellow."
"I am thrilled to welcome Bill to NVIDIA at such a pivotal time for our company," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO, NVIDIA. "His pioneering work in stream processors at Stanford greatly influenced the work we are doing at NVIDIA today. As one of the world's founding visionaries in parallel computing, he shares our passion for the GPU's evolution into a general purpose parallel processor and how it is increasingly becoming the soul of the new PC. His reputation as an innovator in our industry is unrivaled. It is truly an honor to have a legend like Bill in our company."
"I would also like to congratulate David Kirk for the enormous impact he has had at NVIDIA. David has worn many hats over the years - from product architecture to chief evangelist. His technical and strategic insight has helped us enable an entire new world of visual computing. We will all continue to benefit from his valuable contributions."
About Bill Dally
At Stanford University, Dally has been a Professor of Computer Science since 1997 and Chairman of the Computer Science Department since 2005. Dally and his team developed the system architecture, network architecture, signaling, routing and synchronization technology that is found in most large parallel computers today. At Caltech he designed the MOSSIM Simulation Engine and the Torus Routing chip which pioneered "wormhole" routing and virtual-channel flow control. His group at MIT built the J-Machine and the M-Machine, experimental parallel computer systems that pioneered the separation of mechanism from programming models and demonstrated very low overhead synchronization and communication mechanisms. He is a cofounder of Velio Communications and Stream Processors, Inc. Dally is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He is also a Fellow of the IEEE and the ACM and has received the IEEE Seymour Cray Award and the ACM Maurice Wilkes award. He has published over 200 papers, holds over 50 issued patents, and is an author of the textbooks, Digital Systems Engineering and Principles and Practices of Interconnection Networks.
About David Kirk
David Kirk has been with NVIDIA since January 1997. His contribution includes leading NVIDIA graphics technology development for today's most popular consumer entertainment platforms. In 2006, Dr. Kirk was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for his role in bringing high-performance graphics to personal computers. Election to the NAE is among the highest professional distinctions awarded in engineering. In 2002, Dr. Kirk received the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award for his role in bringing high-performance computer graphics systems to the mass market. From 1993 to 1996, Dr. Kirk was Chief Scientist, Head of Technology for Crystal Dynamics, a video game manufacturing company. From 1989 to 1991, Dr. Kirk was an engineer for the Apollo Systems Division of Hewlett-Packard Company. Dr. Kirk is the inventor of 50 patents and patent applications relating to graphics design and has published more than 50 articles on graphics technology. Dr. Kirk holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the California Institute of Technology.
Source:
NVIDIA
"I am thrilled to welcome Bill to NVIDIA at such a pivotal time for our company," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO, NVIDIA. "His pioneering work in stream processors at Stanford greatly influenced the work we are doing at NVIDIA today. As one of the world's founding visionaries in parallel computing, he shares our passion for the GPU's evolution into a general purpose parallel processor and how it is increasingly becoming the soul of the new PC. His reputation as an innovator in our industry is unrivaled. It is truly an honor to have a legend like Bill in our company."
About Bill Dally
At Stanford University, Dally has been a Professor of Computer Science since 1997 and Chairman of the Computer Science Department since 2005. Dally and his team developed the system architecture, network architecture, signaling, routing and synchronization technology that is found in most large parallel computers today. At Caltech he designed the MOSSIM Simulation Engine and the Torus Routing chip which pioneered "wormhole" routing and virtual-channel flow control. His group at MIT built the J-Machine and the M-Machine, experimental parallel computer systems that pioneered the separation of mechanism from programming models and demonstrated very low overhead synchronization and communication mechanisms. He is a cofounder of Velio Communications and Stream Processors, Inc. Dally is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He is also a Fellow of the IEEE and the ACM and has received the IEEE Seymour Cray Award and the ACM Maurice Wilkes award. He has published over 200 papers, holds over 50 issued patents, and is an author of the textbooks, Digital Systems Engineering and Principles and Practices of Interconnection Networks.
About David Kirk
David Kirk has been with NVIDIA since January 1997. His contribution includes leading NVIDIA graphics technology development for today's most popular consumer entertainment platforms. In 2006, Dr. Kirk was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for his role in bringing high-performance graphics to personal computers. Election to the NAE is among the highest professional distinctions awarded in engineering. In 2002, Dr. Kirk received the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award for his role in bringing high-performance computer graphics systems to the mass market. From 1993 to 1996, Dr. Kirk was Chief Scientist, Head of Technology for Crystal Dynamics, a video game manufacturing company. From 1989 to 1991, Dr. Kirk was an engineer for the Apollo Systems Division of Hewlett-Packard Company. Dr. Kirk is the inventor of 50 patents and patent applications relating to graphics design and has published more than 50 articles on graphics technology. Dr. Kirk holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the California Institute of Technology.
44 Comments on NVIDIA Names Stanford's Bill Dally Chief Scientist, VP of Research
this guy seems like a great mind to tap for this kind of product.
t'will be good to see how his input affects Nvidia's products and/or marketing.
This is hopefully good news for Nvidia and better products for us : )
I'm just glad Intel is getting ready to enter the market with NVIDIA perhaps leaving.
In all seriousness: I think philanthropic persuits are fine. In fact they should be encouraged considering cancer takes some of our loved ones away from us every passing day. Unless gaming is somehow more important.:wtf:
I think Nvidia is showing they can be a company with heart and trying to be a great graphics card company at the same time. Nothing wrong with that. Try not to be so negative.
They play the middle man. I got these cards which are supposed to be great for gaming but you can also use them to simulate protein folding for Stanford. The more you buy and the more you run them, the higher your score. What, exactly, is NVIDIA doing philanthropic except facilitating the movement of more product?
If anything it gives a chance for gamers to give a little back to the world. And if you think about it, whats more noble a goal than to try to make the world a better place than it was before by ending the suffering or giving more hope to those in need of a cure. Giving people hope and an outlet to make a difference in a positive way, is never the wrong thing to do.:toast:
Cancer is nature's way of saying you've out lived your welcome.
Quote from F@H FAQ:EDIT: Just for an easy comparison. Fastest supercomputer Roadrunner has 12,960 IBM PowerXCell 8i CPUs and 6,480 AMD Opteron dual-core processors and a peak of 1.7 petaflops. Now looking at the statistics in these forums I find there are 38,933 members. If only half the members contributed to F@H at the same time, there would be much more power there. Now extrapolate to the world...WTF??!!
There's probably a million reasons why that wouldn't work in the market today, but its a thought for some of us who hesitate due to the power bill it could run up, or being restricted to just nvidia cards
Provided that software is written to utilize the GPU for folding in the first place. Which in Nvidia's case it is.
There obviously are inherint problems with Internet-based supercomputing and there's also a whole lot of x-factors that ruin it's potential for science (especially machine stability). Folding especially is very vulnerable to error because every set of work completed is expanded by another and another. For instance, how do we know that the exit tunnel is not the result of an uncaught computational error early on?As was just stated, a 4850 is just as good as the 9800 GTX in terms of gaming but because of the 9800 GTX's architecture, the 9800 GTX is much faster at folding. This is mostly because NVIDIA uses far more transistors which means higher power consumption while AMD takes a smarter-is-better approach using far fewer transistors.
And yes, prioritizing on GPUs leaves much to be desired. I think I recall trying to play Mass Effect while the GPU client was folding and it was unplayable. It is a major issue for everyone that buys cards to game.
The same aplies to x86. The difficulty relies on making the code highly parallel. x86 is NOT designed for parallelism and is as difficult making a highly parallel computing program in x86 as doing it in GPGPU codes.
This BTW was said by Standford guys (maybe even this same guy) BEFORE Nvidia had any relations with them. When GPGPU was nothing else than Brook running in X1900 Ati cards so...False. GPGPU is as prone to errors as supercomputers are, they doublecheck the data is correct in the algorithms. Even if that takes more computing time, reducing efficiency, beause the seer computing power of F@H is like 1000 times that of a supercomputer that means squat.
A GPU does not make more errors than a CPU anyway. And errors resulted from OC yield highly unexpected results that are easy to detect.
Anyway F@H is SCIENCE, do you honestly believe they only send each algorithm to a single person?? The have 1000's of them and they know which one is well and which not. :laugh:
Of course folding at the same time reduces performance, but the fact that GPGPU exists doesn' make the card slower. :laugh:
Next stupid claim??
What happens when a CPU errors? BSOD
What happens when a GPU errors? Artifact
Which is fatal, which isn't? CPUs by design are meant to be precision instruments. One little failure and all goes to waste. GPUs though, they can work with multiple minor failures.
I got no indication from them that any given peice of work is completed more than once for the sake of validation.
No, errors aren't always easy to catch.
Float 2: 00000000000000000000000001000000
Float 4: 00000000000000001000000001000000
If the 17th digit got stuck, every subsequent calculation will be off by a minute amount. For instance:
Should be 2.000061: 00000000000000010000000001000000
Got: 4.0001221: 00000000000000011000000001000000
Considering F@H relies on a lot of multiplication, that alone could create your "exit tunnel."9800 GTX = 754 million transistors
4850 = 666 million transistors
Process doesn't matter except in physical dimensions. The transistor count only changes with architectural changes.It's poorly executed and as a result, CUDA is not for gamers in the slightest.
EDIT: Anyway, I don't know you, but every math program I made at school, doeble checked the results by redundancy, I was teached to do it that way. I expect scientists working to cure cancer received an education as good as mine, AT LEAST as good as mine.
EDIT: Those examples are, in fact, easy to spot errors. Specially in F@H. If you are expecting the molecule to be around the 2 range (you know what to expect, but it's science, you want to know EXACTLY where will it be) and you got 4, well you don't need a high grade to see the difference.WRONG. RV670 has 666 m transistors. RV770 has 956 m transistors. source
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Don't contradict educated facts without doublechecking your info PLEASE.So now you are going to teach me that?? :laugh::laugh:Of course it's not for games (except for PhysX). But it doesn't interfere at all with games performance.
-NVIDIA GeForce is designed specifically for Direct3D (or was).
-CUDA was intended to offload any high FLOP transaction from the CPU. It doesn't matter what the work actually is comprised of.
-CUDA interferes enormously with game performance because it's horrible at prioritizing threads.
-Larrabee is a graphics card--but not really. It is simply designed to be a high FLOP, general purpose card that can be used for graphics among other things. Larrabee is an x86 approach to the high-FLOP needs (programmable cores).
Let's just say CUDA is riddled with a lot of problems that Larrabee is very likely to address. CUDA is a short-term answer to a long term problem.
- Yes and I don't see where you're going with that.
- Unless you want to use CUDA for PhysX, CUDA doesn't interfere with gaming AT ALL. And in any case, Nvidia has hired this guy to fix those kind of problems. It's going to move to MIMD cores too, so that thing is going to be completely fix in the next generation of GPUs.
- Yes, exactly.
Many people think that GPGPU is the BEST answer for that, and they all of them don't work for Nvidia. In fact, many work for Ati.
For starters, Anyones efforts to do humanity a favour, especially of this magnitute should be respected, regardless of belief's, unless you wish the Terran race extinction ofcourse. But thats because good and evil does exist regardless if religion does or not.
. . . . If CUDA doesnt increase f.p.s, nor does it decrease it. Then that equals even.
. . . . If CUDA does ANYTHING. Then thats a plus.
Darkmatter, thank you for explaining to those out there that cant comprehend, but unfortunately i think its fallen on blind hearts . . . Oh wait a minute, all of out hearts are blind . . . Maybe i meant cold hearted.
Anyways, im going to go and take out my graphics cards and play Cellfactor @ 60+ f.p.s with just the Asus Ageia P1.
Edit : Ohh ye, almost forgot. I want to know how much Bill and David are on p.a. I bet the x-Nvidia staff would like to know too.
I dont think either Bill or David have much more to offer Nvidia, and i dont think they will bother either. Good luck to the green team.
And if you are talking about PhysX, take in mind that the game is doing more, so you get more for more, not the same while requiring more as you are suggesting. If it comes a time when GPGPU is used for say AI, then the same will be true, you will get more than what the CPU alone can do while mantaining more frames too, because without the GPU it would be unable to provide enough frames with that kind of detail. That's the case with PhysX and that will be the case with any GPGPU code used in games.
But then again, FLOPs for mainstream users aren't that important (just for their budgeting). It is kind of ackward to see so much focus on less than 10% of a market. Everyone (AMD, Intel, AMD, Sony, IBM, etc.) are all pushing for changes to the FPU when ALU needs work too.F@H should be smart enough to back off when the GPU is in use (the equivilent of low priority on x86 CPUs). Until they fix that, it's useless to gamers.
Regardless, I still don't support F@H. Their priority is in results, not accurate results.
Physx is useless.
The problem with GPGPU is the GPU is naturally a purpose-built device: binary -> display. Any attempts to multitask it leads to severe consequences because it's primary purpose is getting encroached upon. The only way to overcome that is multiple GPUs but then they really aren't GPUs at all because they aren't working on graphics. This loops back into what I said earlier in this post that the GPU is going away.
Regarding F@H IMO you are not qualified to make any critic to their methodology and how accurate it is or not. Your lack of respect for (and I dare to say aknowledge of) the Scientific Methology is evident.
PhysX is not useless at all. You might not like it, you might not need it, you might not want it, but it's the first iteration of what will be the next revolution in gaming. I like it, I want it I NEED it, and like me millions of people.