NVIDIA-Led Team Receives $25 Million Contract From DARPA to Develop High-Performance GPU Computing Systems

SANTA CLARA, CA--(Marketwire - August 9, 2010) -  A team led by NVIDIA has been awarded a research grant of $25 million by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. Defense Department's research and development arm, to address what the agency calls a "crisis in computing." 

The four-year research contract, awarded under DARPA's Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC ) program, covers work to develop GPU technologies required to build the new class of exascale supercomputers which will be 1,000-times more powerful than today's fastest supercomputers.

The team -- which also includes Cray Inc., Oak Ridge National Laboratory and six top U.S. universities -- is being funded by DARPA to address the challenge that conventional computing architectures are reaching the practical limits of energy usage and will not meet the challenges of exascale computing. The research team plans to develop new software and hardware technology to dramatically increase computing performance, programmability and reliability.

"This recognizes NVIDIA's substantial investments in the field of parallel processing and highlights GPU Computing's position as one of the most promising paths to exascale computing," said Bill Dally, NVIDIA's chief scientist and senior vice president of research, and the team's principal investigator. "We look forward to collaborating to develop programmable, scalable systems that operate in tight power budgets and deliver increases in performances that are many orders of magnitude above today's systems."

"The DARPA UHPC program is attacking technical issues that are key to the future of high performance computing, from the embedded terascale to the exascale," said Steve Scott, Cray's senior vice president and CTO, and the Cray principal investigator on the team. "We are excited to be working with this team, and we believe the directions we are pursuing will lead to radical improvements to the state-of-the-art in the coming decade."

In addition to the NVIDIA-led team, DARPA awarded contracts to three other teams to study UHPC systems. Prototype systems are expected to be completed by 2018.

The names of those universities on the NVIDIA team will be available once details with them have been finalized. For more information on the DARPA UHPC program, please go here.

About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) awakened the world to the power of computer graphics when it invented the GPU in 1999. Since then, it has consistently set new standards in visual computing with breathtaking, interactive graphics available on devices ranging from tablets and portable media players to notebooks and workstations. NVIDIA's expertise in programmable GPUs has led to breakthroughs in parallel processing which make supercomputing inexpensive and widely accessible. The company holds more than 1,100 U.S. patents, including ones covering designs and insights which are fundamental to modern computing. For more information, see www.nvidia.com.

Certain statements in this press release including, but not limited to, statements as to the benefits of GPU computing 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: 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-Q for the fiscal period ended May 2, 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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