November 8, 2006

Jensen Huang announces CUDA

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced CUDANVIDIA's parallel computing platform — lets developers run general code on GPUs for ML and simulation. on November 8, 2006 — opening GPUs to general-purpose parallel computing.

What it was for

Jensen HuangCUDANVIDIA's parallel computing platform — lets developers run general code on GPUs for ML and simulation. let researchers run matrix math on graphics cards — enabling the deep learningNeural networks with many layers that learn hierarchical representations from data. boom years before AlexNet. It turned NVIDIA from a gaming GPUGraphics processing unit — a chip optimized for parallel math; now used for graphics, ML, and scientific computing. vendor into an AI infrastructure company.

People

  • Jensen Huangceo

Companies

  • NVIDIA

Why it's here

CUDANVIDIA's parallel computing platform — lets developers run general code on GPUs for ML and simulation. unlocked GPUGraphics processing unit — a chip optimized for parallel math; now used for graphics, ML, and scientific computing. computing for science and machine learningSystems that learn patterns from data rather than following only explicit programmed rules..

Why it mattered

It made massively parallel hardware accessible through C extensions developers could adopt.

What it solved

GPUs were locked to graphics APIs unsuitable for numerical computing.

Media

  • Jensen Huang
    ImageJensen Huang

    The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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