We received an interesting press release from nVidia. The e-mail begins with the following statement "NVIDIA Corporation, inventor of the GPU"... we'll leave you to conclude the truthfulness of that statement. Nevertheless, the story is certifying Harvard University as a CUDA Center of Excellence. This comes after Harvard recently spent a two million USD grant that the university received from the NSF [National Science Foundation], for the development of GPU-enabled computational science.
Harvard opted to spend its grant on adopting CUDA into its curriculum and it was quite logical for nVidia to get activated and start supporting this prestigious university. We read through the press release and there were no specific details on how much nVidia invested in the university, but professor Hanspeter Pfister was very happy about this investment - given that he is teaching the newly implemented curriculum about heterogeneous computing at the Harvard Initiative in Innovative Computing.
Harvard University is using GPUs to carry out research such as Connectome [decoding the structure of the human brain], MWA telescope [origins of the universe] and Qchem projects [studying quantum chemistry of molecules].
All in all, nVidia certified yet another university and the company is making sure that no matter what future holds for them, the new generation of scientists and programmers will know how to program in massively parallel code, regardless of what the executing platform will be.
