A great gaming device deserves amazing games. This is just one of the reasons we pre-loaded every SHIELD with Sonic The Hedgehog 4: Episode II– at a silky smooth 60 FPS – and Expendable: Rearmed.

Sonic The Hedgehog 4: Episode II: pre-loaded with every SHIELD.

But it doesn’t stop there. Not even close.

A host of talented development studios, from around the world, have delivered big time with their games for Tegra devices. With 35 SHIELD games optimized for Tegra and over 65 additional Android games with built-in controller support, gamers will have non-stop entertainment on the go.

So let’s take a look at what you have to look forward to.

Five Brand Spankin’ New Games Went Live Today

Blood Sword: Sword of Ruin
Developer:  OneQ Soft

Unveiled at CES, this action-packed role-playing game has come a long way. Blood Sword: Sword of Ruin is set in an ancient, magical world. This gorgeous looking game has been optimized for Tegra 4 devices, including SHIELD, with high resolution textures, dynamic shadows, normal maps and realistic smoke and fire effects.

Choplifter HD
Developer: inXile

Choplifter HD players take on the role of an up-and-coming rescue pilot asked to join an elite, international helicopter rescue team. Pilots are trained to command a variety of helicopters deployed on more than 30 different missions.

Combining reality with elements of fantasy, missions will range from captured military prisoner extraction to saving survivors of viral outbreaks. Pilots must bank, hover, touch-down and sometimes even shake zombies from their chopper during lift-off in order to make their rescue and complete their mission. Choplifter HD dares players to risk their lives to save others.

Chuck’s Challenge 3D
Developer: Niffler

From the design genius behind the classic Chip’s Challenge, comes Chuck’s Challenge 3D, a fiendishly addictive puzzler that’s packed with features that will tease the brain and challenge the fingers. You take Woop, a puzzle-lovin’ alien capable of altering time and space, through countless levels and see where your times rank on the online leaderboard.

The game also comes with a level editor that lets you create, upload and share your custom levels for everyone to play and rate, all from within the game.

The team at Niffler was particularly impressed with SHIELD, noting that “NVIDIA’s Tegra 4 processor allowed us to add special effects to Chuck’s Challenge 3D which normally would be reserved for PC & Mac, such as real-time shadows and refractive water. NVIDIA, as we see with SHIELD, continues to blur the line between desktop and mobile gaming.”

Space Ark
Developer: Strawdog Studios

Join the Arkonauts as they bounce their way across the universe and discover grey, broken worlds and collect precious crystals that allow them to terraform new landscapes. You’ll progress through 30 missions across five diverse worlds by unlocking powerful weapons, crystal upgrades and planetary shields.

Strawdog’s Technical Honcho, Simon Morris, commented on how great the game looks with the power of Tegra processors: “With hundreds of 3D objects on screen, rich animated worlds and characters, all rendered with real-time lighting and gazillions of particles, NVIDIA Tegra really gives some serious bang for buck.”

Tainted Keep
Developer: Ravn Studios

Find out what dark and sinister evil awaits in this console-quality sword and spell dungeon crawler. The once idyllic village of Greenhaven is now a near lifeless husk, the souls of its inhabitants having been drained by the powerful wizard Morg, who has used them to create the abominations that now occupy the mighty keep that was once the source of protection for the village. As Xobia, enter the keep to find the source of Morg’s power and put an end to the misery that has been unleashed on the hapless village.

Ravn Studio’s CEO, Stine Waern, had high praise for what SHIELD is capable of, “SHIELD is it by far the fastest mobile device we’ve worked on and it lets us put console-quality graphics on a handheld device!”

Play The Best – Tegra-Optimized For SHIELD

In addition to the titles available for the first time, a number of existing TegraZone games have SHIELD support. Many feature new Tegra enhancements.

• Aliens vs. Predators: Evolution
• ARMA Tactics
• Auralux
• Beach Buggy Blitz
• Burn Zombie Burn
• Dead Trigger
• Grand Theft Auto III
• Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
• Hamilton’s Great Adventure
• HISTORY Great Battles Medieval
• Hockey Nations 2011
• Jett Tailfin Racers
• Max Payne Mobile
• Puddle
• Real Boxing
• Renaissance Blood
• Riptide GP
• Riptide GP 2
• RU Golf
• Shadowgun
• Shadowgun: Deadzone
• Shine Runner
• Skiing Fred
• SoulCraft
• Star Wars Pinball
• The Bard’s Tale
• The Conduit HD
• Zen Pinball
• Zombie Driver

In addition to all the great Tegra-optimized titles, there are a ton of additional games currently available on Google Play that feature controller support and play well on SHIELD.

The full list can be found on the SHIELD website at http://shield.nvidia.com/play-android-games/.

Game. On.

The votes are in, and four nonprofit organizations tackling sex trafficking, promoting clean water, supporting education for girls and helping U.S. veterans have each been selected to receive $50,000 grants from the NVIDIA Foundation, our employee-led corporate foundation.

It’s no wonder our High Impact Grant Program, which has awarded nearly $1 million to more than 20 organizations in its five years, is one of the foundation’s biggest and most popular initiatives. It keeps employees engaged every step of the way: they’re the ones who nominate the organizations, review grant applications and vote on who receives the grants.

This year, NVIDIANs around the world nominated 71 organizations from 17 countries. More than 35 employees sat on the review committee and narrowed down the submissions to 10 finalists.

More than 2,400 NVIDIANs then took to the virtual voting booths to make the four organizations below this year’s High Impact Grant Program recipients.

Aqua Clara International 
Kenya, Africa

Aqua Clara International (ACI) works to establish sustainable, locally owned businesses that provide affordable, clean water and other health products for families in Kenya living on less than $2 a day. Our grant will help ACI train staff and affiliates to promote good practices for water, sanitation and hygiene in schools and households, and to create water sanitation centers and businesses, ultimately providing over 5,500 people with clean water.

Mahindra Foundation
India

The Mahindra Foundation’s Project Nanhi Kali provides educational scholarships for girls to encourage them to attend school. Education correlates with reduced chances of child and maternal mortality, improved child nutrition and health, as well as better economic production and female empowerment. Our grant will help educate185 underprivileged girls in grades 6-10 for three years, improving their future prospects. 

Prajwala
India

Prajwala works to halt sex trafficking by partnering with groups dedicated to preventing and prosecuting the illegal trade. Prajwala also helps heal victims of sexual slavery and reintegrate them into society. Our grant will serve 150 victims by helping expand Prajwala’s approach to sex-trafficking rehabilitation, which creates healing environments for adult victims; provides literacy classes, livelihood training and life skills education; and facilitates civic empowerment and social reintegration. 

Veterans Supportive Services Agency 
Silicon Valley, California, USA

The Veterans Supportive Services Agency, Inc. (VSSA) provides lifetime supportive services to Silicon Valley veterans and their families, allowing them to live with independence and dignity. Our grant will allow the VSSA to hire two part-time staff to help 200 veterans file claims for compensation and benefits, and strengthen a program that recruits others to support veterans.

We know they’re going to have a transformational impact on the people they serve.

Update: We’ve removed a link to Aqua Clara’s web site because it redirected users away from that site and to a third-party Web site that could potentially expose users to a virus.  

Head-mounted 3D displays have promised to be the next big thing for decades. If only they weren’t so big.

But while our tech gadgets have shrunk from devices that you could lug around the office into phones and tablets that can be slipped into a pocket, head-mounted 3D displays have remained stubbornly bulky. The problem:  electronics have shrunk, but optics haven’t kept pace.

Douglas Lanman, a researcher at NVIDIA, uses an array of microlenses— and some sophisticated graphics technology — to solve this problem, turning headwear that screams “geek” into something much more chic.

We debuted this approach — which Lanman is calling a near-eye light-field display – at the recent SIGGRAPH visual computing conference.

“This is virtual reality without having to wear something the size of shoe box on your head,” Lanman says.

In fact, today’s devices look a lot like the first head-mounted display created by Ivan Sutherland in 1968. To explain why, Lanman pulls out the optics in a pair of 3D glasses now on the market. While the electronics and micro-displays used in the device are vanishingly thin, the optics aren’t.

This representative device is built around optics that are each over 1.25 inches – or 33.5 mm – thick and weigh 58 grams. As a result, the whole device has to be sculpted around these bulky lenses. “This is why we’re stuck,” he says. “You want an immersive virtual reality experience, but the optics won’t let you have it.”

The solution Lanman and Senior Director of Research David Luebke came up with: more lenses. Lots more lenses. Rather than having each eye look through one big lens at an image that’s roughly an inch away, Lanman’s mockup lets users look through an array of tiny lenses at an image on an OLED panel that’s much closer.

As a result, the optics in Lanman’s prototype are just 3.3 mm thick and weigh about 0.7 grams each. That’s roughly one-tenth the size of current ones.

But size isn’t the only advantage. Because the microlenses present slightly different images to the eye, depending on how they’re positioned, images that the eyes are focused on appear sharper, mimicking the way vision works in real life.

Lanman came up with the idea of using microlenses after Frank Fox, who leads NVIDIA’s Consumer Electronics Engineering group, asked Lanman to look at ways to improve head-mounted displays using light-field technology. The assignment was a good fit for Lanman, who has a long-running interest in displays. Lanman holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Brown University and spent two years at MIT’s famed Media Lab before joining NVIDIA.

The drawback to near eye light-field displays: relying on microlenses cuts down on an image’s resolution, since each tiny lens is magnifying just a small portion of a display upon which different perspectives of the same scene are rendered.

Even with today’s super dense micro-displays, the result isn’t high-definition. Yet. But that’s changing. Lanman is betting that within five years or so, higher-definition displays will be commercially available. As a result, thin, comfortable head-mounted displays may finally be a reality.

Point. Click. Participate. If you’ve ever daydreamed of curing exotic diseases, hunting for aliens, or prospecting for riches, your GPU can help turn you from dreamer to doer.

That’s because your GPU is good for more than blasting through Battlefield 3 and exploring the virtual world of Skyrim. These graphics rendering engines are built using the parallel processing architecture prized by researchers. Some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers are built using our GPUs.

A few are even built using borrowed time on the GPUs of enthusiasts. Many distributed computing projects let you download a simple-to-use software program known as BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Open Computing) to unleash the untapped computing power of your graphics card for the common good. As if you needed another excuse to buy a GeForce.

Here are five projects – and links to more details on how to get started – that will let you throw your NVIDIA GPU into the mix.

Sought after by scientists: NVIDA GPUs are used in some of the world’s fastest supercomputers.

Cure Alzheimer’s
Folding@Home

Kicked off by Stanford University Professor Vijay Pande in 2000, Folding@Home claims 279,000 participants and is one of the world’s fastest computing systems. Folding@Home simulates how proteins within your body assemble themselves. When they misfire, it can lead to diseases. Researchers hope to create treatments for these “misfolds” to head off illnesses like Alzheimer’s. Data from this project has already helped produce 109 research papers.

Getting started: Download this project’s client software, here. If you’ve got a modern GPU, this project’s software will automatically take advantage of it. Slick.

Find Aliens
SETI@Home

If you’re a fan of flying saucers, you can use your GPU to help the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at the University of California, Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory. SETI@Home analyzes data collected from the Arecibo radio telescope, with the goal of separating boring ol’ space noise from data that might indicate a transmission from a non-human entity. Since SETI@home began in 1999, the project hasn’t found ET. They’re still looking, however.

How to get started: If you’ve got a CUDA-capable NVIDIA GPU, head here to get started. Don’t know if you’ve got a CUDA-friendly GPU? Click here.

Do you want to believe? Help SETI@Home continues its search for real-life aliens.

Hunt for Treasure
Bitcoin

Despite its mysterious origins, there’s plenty of computer science behind the “distributed consensus” system tracking Bitcoin expenditures and currency generation. Over the past four years Bitcoin’s popularity has surged. But if you’re dreaming of buying a mansion with the proceeds from your Bitcoin “mining,” you’ve missed out. In October 2011, a Bitcoin was worth $2. Now? About $96, though that’s way down from a peak of $266 in April. At this point, unless your machine is ridiculously efficient, you’re not making a profit. But it can be fun.

Getting started: We could point you to places where you can download Bitcoin mining software, but if you’re coming to this cold, start with the Bitcoin wiki.

Search for the Cure
GPUGRID

Hosted at Catalonia’s Universitat Pompeu Fabra, GPUGRID analyzes the movement, structure and function of atoms to better understand cancer drug resistance, HIV maturation and why certain proteins involved in neural disorders resist treatment. GPUGrid might be small – with around 2,000 active contributors – but it has churned out a significant amount of work since 2007. That includes a 2012 paper explaining how a significant step in the maturation process of HIV was simulated for the first time.

Getting started: To check your GPU’s compatibility and download the drivers and BOINC client you’ll need to participate, head here.

Do It All
World Community Grid

Your GPU can even join the fight against HIV.

With World Community Grid you’re not just signing up to help out with a specific project. Rather, your GPU will join roughly 66,000 others contributing to all the organization’s projects by default, which includes AIDS, clean water and clean energy research. Founded in 2004 by IBM, more than 600,000 users have contributed roughly 750,000 years of computing research. Even IBM’s supercomputer Jeopardy competitor Watson helped: IBM donated its game show winnings of $500,000 to the World Community Grid in 2011. We would have saved a little on the side for some video card upgrades.

Getting started: Head here to register for World Community Grid and download the BOINC client software you’ll need.

Silicon Valley is the future. Detroit is the past. That’s the conventional wisdom. Well, the conventional wisdom isn’t quite right. We’ve been investing in Michigan for years. So we’re excited to report that we’re accelerating these efforts by opening the NVIDIA Technology Center in Ann Arbor.

We’re not alone. Microsoft and Google have opened offices in southeast Michigan, not far from Detroit. The New York Timesreports that GM, Ford and other companies in the area are hiring hundreds of software developers to create in-vehicle apps for the connected car.

New in town – NVIDIA revving up in Ann Arbor

This is where consumer electronics and safety advancements are being made that will change the driving experience for all of us. NVIDIA has been fueling this trend for years. A number of our employees live in the area and already work closely with car companies. Chrysler, Ford and GM use NVIDIA products to design, style and build their cars and trucks.

All of this activity has helped make Ann Arbor a high-tech hub, and not just for the Detroit area. It’s the home of the University of Michigan with its world-class engineering school. Names most people don’t typically associate with Detroit – Toyota, Nissan, Hyundai and Mercedes-Benz – all have offices here.

Our new facility will help our growing team of Michigan-based engineers and executives work with automakers and suppliers to develop next-generation infotainment, navigation and driver assistance programs – all of which make driving more enjoyable and safer.

Hands-on development with unique drive-in garage

Michael Finney, president and CEO of the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, says:

“I’m pleased to see more technology-focused companies look to the state of Michigan as a resourceful home and partner. NVIDIA’s commitment to the state of Michigan is an encouraging sign for future growth and jobs in the technology and automotive industries.”

NVIDIA already powers in-dash digital instrument clusters as well as navigation and information displays in more than 4 million vehicles from automakers such as Audi, Bentley, BMW, Lamborghini, Maserati, Rolls Royce, Tesla Motors and VW.

There’s more to come. The years ahead will see amazing advancements in automotive technologies. Many of them are going to happen here, in southeastern Michigan. We’re going to help drive them.

Chances are you’ll find us playing Frisbee on the lawn or at a presentation by CEO Jen-Hsun Huang or other NVIDIA executives. Or, you might catch us returning from a company-sponsored paintball tournament. Or locking up a bike at the rack near the parking garage.

Your next safest bet for finding us? Outside the company café, taking a lunch break in the beautiful California summer. Take the word of this wistful Silicon Valley native who’s gotten used to Manhattan’s wild swings in weather while at Yeshiva University: We’re soaking up as much of the glorious summer sun as possible.

But it’s not all fun in the sun for the more than 300 paid interns from over 20 universities across the globe that NVIDIA recruited this summer. We were hired to make real, game-changing contributions. So truth be told, if you really need to find us, we’re in the same place you’d look for any other NVIDIA employee: at work.

Pawel Kozlowski and Vanna Chan sport intern tees at a Tough Mudder obstacle course event.

Vanna Chan is an NVIDIA GRID systems engineering intern hailing from Ontario, Canada. She’s a mechatronics major at the University of Waterloo (which experienced flooding earlier this summer). She gets hands-on in her work with the GPU boards solutions team running sustainability and benchmark tests on NVIDIA GRID servers before they’re shipped out.

“Working on GRID is amazing. We are the first company to solve graphics streaming and latency issues and make cloud gaming a great platform,” she says. “The experience is awesome and a lot of gamers are going to be using GRID, so it’s cool knowing you’re contributing to something so revolutionary.”

As a communications and marketing intern, I rewrite news articles about NVIDIA, contribute content to our internal portal and help edit and write posts (like this one) for the NVIDIA blog. If I’m not at my cubicle, it’s because I’m attending meetings or accompanying PR execs to press briefings. Throughout my day, I’m learning about corporate marketing strategy – from how to best engage industry analysts to answering the stickiest of journalist questions.

Other interns are working on breakthroughs in visual technology that will play key roles outside of gaming. Now in his third summer here, Glenn Elliott found his niche working with the research team on future programming languages for programming multiple GPUs at once. He hopes to use this experience in the area of automotive applications after completing his Ph.D. in real-time systems at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“We’re starting to explore support for real-time operating systems with CUDA, which is exciting for mobile processing developments in the auto industry,” he says.

Michael Ledesma (far left) with fellow interns and an employee at a paintball event.

Michael Ledesma, a performance-analyst intern and engineering physics major at the University of the Pacific, says that benchmarking video game performance on GPUs has helped expand his horizons, as well. He was hoping to spend his internship in the engineering department, but has since found a new interest at NVIDIA.

“This has been an awesome learning experience for me,” he explains. “I get to see how NVIDIA comes up with more efficient drivers to speed up performance. The more time I spend on GPU performance, the more interested in it I become.”

In addition to better understanding what NVIDIA does and finding their individual grooves, interns get to interact directly with senior executives, engineers and scientists.

“Even though it’s a relatively large company, I like that it’s a flat hierarchy,” Glenn says. “I get to work closely with thought-leaders. I really appreciate the culture of availability people here have towards each other.”

It’s things like the openness of NVIDIA’s work culture that have a big impact on interns, making them want to return as full-time employees.

Since NVIDIA recruits interns from far-flung parts of the world, many find their biggest complaint lies outside the office: getting around the Bay Area to work and excursions. “At first, I didn’t want to go out because it’s so far without a car. Eventually, though, you get used to riding an hour on your bike,” Vanna says.

Interns spell out “NVIDIA” on the lawn.

Like Vanna, most interns quickly learn to circumvent any obstructions to summer fun.

Infrastructure intern Pawel Kozlowski, a native of Poland, wasn’t going to let anything prevent him from making regular weekend surfing excursions to Santa Cruz. He can’t stop comparing the clear, crisp blue sky overhead to the bleak, grey façade of summer horizons back in Norway’s University of Oslo, where he is pursuing a Ph.D. in volume rendering in medical applications.

And on weekends, Vanna, Pawel and others rent cars or find rides to explore the coast. Popular sites include Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, Big Sur and Pismo Beach. On Memorial Day weekend, Pawel headed down to Los Angeles.

“L.A. was kind of trashy,” Pawel laughs. “But Santa Monica and Venice Beach were really nice.”

But Pawel has no complaints as he heads back to work after a long weekend out in the sun. “My whole interest in computers started with gaming, and I’ve always used NVIDIA graphics cards to play. So I figured that working here would be a good experience that would contribute to my career,” he says.

For an intern who does nothing but work on improving the quality of those games, it’s a dream come true.

Sweden’s gaming scene is thriving like never before. This is the land where DICE makes Battlefield. It’s  home to the indie hit, Minecraft. Some even consider computer games to be Sweden’s biggest cultural export since ABBA. Quite a statement

There’s also a strong sense of community in Sweden’s gaming world.  So, we recently teamed up with one of our key Swedish retailers, Inet.se, for a pair of simultaneous summer gaming events that brought the GeForce experience to over a thousand Swedish gamers at Inet stores in Stockholm and the southern city of  Malmö.

Enthusiastic competitors queued from early hours at both venues waiting for the doors to open, and Inet’s staff rewarded fans for their dedication with exclusive goodies.

Inside both stores, GeForce GTX powered Taurus gaming rigs ran Battlefield 3 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), showcasing an insanely fast, smooth and whisper-quite experience.

Congratulations to the first prize winners: Patrik Eriksson (Stockholm) and Sebastian Edvinsson (Malmö).

Inet wanted to give gamers pure performance, and that’s exactly what it did with our new range of 7-series GPUs, perfectly tuned to today’s most advanced gaming technologies, including NVIDIA’sGeForce Experience for one-click driver and game setting optimisation, PhysX and TXAA.

One of Sweden’s most prolific e-Sports teams, Eyeballers, and zAAz, the world’s best female Counter-Strike player, set up various challenges at the events, inviting the public to compete in both Battlefield 3 and CS:GO for a chance to win a prize.

88% of participants managed to get at least one kill against the pro gamers.

We’ve said a lot about SHIELD. Now it’s time to let everyone else do the talking.

With SHIELD now shipping from Newegg, Gamestop, Microcenter, Canada Computers and NVIDIA, the fun is just beginning.

“SHIELD got me excited about gaming again, and it accomplished that across two vastly different platforms,” wrote Jason Evangelho, for Forbes.

Here’s what else the critics have to say:

1. SHIELD is a do-it-all entertainment device - Used in tandem with those loud stereo speakers, we found ourselves comfortably employing the SHIELD like a portable DVD player from the early oughts, streaming The Daily Show via Hulu+ instead of watching old Friends DVDs.” – Engadget
2. It’s a great Android gaming device–“SHIELD is the best that Android Gaming has to offer.” - Ubergizmo
3. PC streaming, now in BETA, is a new kind of gaming experience -“… why would you buy a SHIELD over, say, a new Nexus 7? I can tell you why I’m buying one: PC game streaming.” – The Verge
4. It keeps going, and going… -“Perhaps it’s Tegra 4’s power-sipping core or maybe it’s pixie dust, but SHIELD’s battery is a beast.” – Forbes
5. It can fly-“The SHIELD is also compatible with the Parrot AR Drone app and its dual analog sticks can be used to wreak havoc control a Parrot Drone…  after using it, I can’t imagine attempting to [do] the same with touch controls. For my money, this is the only way to fly.” – CNET
6. Console quality games -“Sonic the Hedgehog is a classic with very broad appeal. It’s a bright, colorful platformer that wouldn’t even be out of place on Xbox Live Arcade.” – Tom’s Hardware
7. It’s built to last*– “Build quality is so good I told Anand that I wanted to try running it over with my car.” – AnandTech

*Note: we do not recommend, endorse or condone attempting to run over SHIELD with an automobile. This will void the warranty. It might also damage your car.

Faster planes. More fuel-efficient cars. Wind tunnels are incredibly useful tools. Even high-performance clothes used by runners and bikers are tested in them. But a world-class wind tunnel isn’t cheap, and time in one is precious. One solution: virtual wind tunnels.

Building on the work to create special-purpose software using algorithms well-suited to GPU computing, students at Germany’s TU Clausthal crafted a virtual wind tunnel that uses an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 GPU to simulate airflow on a computational grid with 300,000 cells. The result: a smooth visualization of the transient flow of air over an object. All done on a GPU that can be picked up at the nearest electronics store.

TU Clausthal was among the more than three dozen institutions from 11 countries that were added this past quarter to our roster of CUDA Research Centers and CUDA Teaching Centers. There are now a total of 293 CUDA Research and Teaching centers in 43 countries.

CUDA Teaching Centers equip tens of thousands of students graduating each year with the knowledge and expertise to take advantage of the parallel processing power of GPUs (see “What Is CUDA?”). They get free teaching kits, textbooks, software licenses, NVIDIA CUDA architecture-enabled GPUs for teaching lab computers and academic discounts for additional hardware.

CUDA Research Centers embrace GPU computing across multiple research fields. They have access to exclusive events with key researchers and academics, a designated NVIDIA technical liaison and specialized training sessions.

Here are a few more examples of CUDA-related work taking place at some of our newest CUDA Research Centers:

Illinois Institute of Technology (U.S.)

Providing a catalyst for discussion between NVIDIA and the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and their collaborators, the University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory and Cray, the CUDA Research Center at IIT was established to support a variety of GPGPU research. The core research is centered on making GPUs a viable computing platform for Many-Task Computing (MTC) applications. This work aims to address the programmability gap between the MTC paradigm and many-core accelerators through an innovative CUDA middleware GeMTC (GPU enabled Many-Task Computing) coupled with the Swift implicitly parallel data-flow driven programming system.

RIKEN (Japan)

RIKEN (the Advanced Center for Computing and Communication) is Japan’s largest and most comprehensive research organization for basic and applied science and a world leader in a diverse array of scientific disciplines. The CUDA Research Center at RIKEN provides its researchers a computing environment and opportunity for consultation to tune their program codes.

Vishwakarma Institute of Technology, Pune (India)

Researchers at the Vishwakarma Institute of Technology in Pune are investigating Fuzzy Hyper Line Segment Neural Networks (FHLSNN). The networks learn patterns in terms of hyper lines, which are fuzzy sets and are associated with their fuzzy membership function.  The institute plans to speed up training and testing phases of FHLSNN on the NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPU for high-dimensional, large data sets.

 Additional new CUDA Research Centers include:

• Centro Extremeño de Tecnologías Avanzadas (Spain)
• Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (India)
• Wuhan University (China)

The new CUDA Teaching Centers include:

• City College of San Francisco (U.S.)
• Inner Mongolia University (China)
• New York University (U.S.)
• Northwestern Polytechnical University (China)
• Rajarambapu Institute of Technology (India)
• RK University (India)
• Shanghai University (China)
• Tokyo Metropolitan University (Japan)
• TU Delft (Netherlands)
• Universidad Nacional de Cuyo (Argentina)
• Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco (Brazil)
• Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain)
• University of Calcutta (India)

For more information on NVIDIA research activities and these programs, visit the NVIDIA Research site.

Most gaming devices are black boxes. You use the games and apps the device’s manufacturer approves. No tinkering. End of story.

That’s not where we wanted to go with SHIELD, which began shipping last week. That’s why we’ve released the open-source code developers and modders can use to customize SHIELD’s entire operating system.

So, just to recap, this is a device you already can use to play mobile games, watch movies, and listen to music. You can stream games from your PC with our PC Game Streaming feature, now in BETA. You can even use it to fly an AR.Parrot drone.

Experts only: if you’ve got the skills, we’ve got some thrills.

But if you’re not content with what SHIELD can do out of the box, we invite you to build out SHIELD’s capabilities in any way you wish. To be sure, this is double-diamond stuff. If you’re not a coder or already set up with an Android development environment you should skip downloading these tools and perhaps just check out what the amazing XDA community can do instead.

And yes, our warranty policy does allow us to reject returns if a device has been rooted or a boot loader has been unlocked. Our goal here isn’t to discourage people from rooting their devices – it’s yours, after all  – but to give us a course of action if folks start to abuse the hardware through software modifications.

Ready to dive in? Head over to our “Develop for SHIELD” page. Then, grab the “SHIELD Open Source and Binary Driver Release.” You’ll find both a preinstalled factory OS image and the latest over-the-air (OTA) update. Don’t worry if you mess things up: we’re also providing a binary recovery image you can use to restore SHIELD to its stock software configuration.

Image, above, by Greg Younger. 

Nothing against old-school gaming, but nobody likes Final Fantasy VII hair.

You know what we’re talking about — the digital look that re-creates what would happen if a character poured jars of $2 hair gel into a drum, flipped upside-down, dunked his noggin’ in, and let the mess dry in front of an industrial heater. And to think, Final Fantasy VII was at the top of its game in 1997.

The world of 3D modeling has come a long way since then. And there’s more coming, thanks to the work NVIDIA has put into its APEX physical simulation framework and PhysX real-time physics engine.

APEX is already being used to make clothes that billow and flow as a character moves or their environment changes. In BioShock Infinite, for example, the APEX clothing module allows for the real-time simulation of Elizabeth’s iconic blue dress.

The next step: applying that technology to hair. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, due next year, will be one of the first major titles to use NVIDIA’s new Hair/Fur APEX module, giving the hair, clothing, and fur of beasts and Witchers a flowing, lifelike look.

How does this work? Spoiler: it’s complicated. There’s a reason video games have typically lacked a strong simulation system for modeling tens of thousands of separate hair strands, in real-time. Our latest generation of GPUs – based on Kepler architecture – provides the power and efficiency to handle that kind of workload.

APEX provides the software smarts, thanks to the “Follow the Leader” technique, which treats individual strands of hair like chains of individual particles – as if a piece of hair was made out of a strand of pearls. Each ‘pearl’ has to exist within a particular radius from the one preceding it in the chain. So when the first pearl in the ‘strand’ moves, the second pearl naturally gravitates towards the closest point within the set radius of the first pearl. The third pearl follows, and then the fourth, et cetera. Easy.

It’s a trickier in a dynamic environment, especially when the “Follow the Leader” system assigns the last particle in a strand an overwhelming amount of kinetic energy. This causes the “hair” to fly around chaotically, as seen in the video below:

The solution: a correction to the velocity equation these “pearls” use when interacting with a dynamic environment. This requires a careful balance: one that preserves the realism and fluid motion of the strand without introducing a “dampening,” or loss of intensity, into the movement.

Hair Meets… Hair

Interactions between individual hair strands are handled by dividing the velocities and densities of their particles within a set space to create a single average. This average is then applied to each particle’s velocity to create a sense of friction, or the degree to which these particles’ velocities should be modified based on the interference of their surrounding environment.

Interestingly, interactions between hair and chunkier characters often don’t even need their own system or equation to be processed. If a character is rocking a shorter haircut, the “hair-hair” interaction model previously described works well to simulate the hair strands’ collisions with, say, a character’s head.

If the hair and the skin attached to it are a similar color, the “hair-hair” interaction model might not even be necessary. Otherwise, longer hair requires a collision volume to be set up – a series of eight geometric shapes (3D ellipses, in this case) that allow PhysX to detect interaction between hair and objects and respond appropriately. Clever. One could say it’s even… shear genius.

HAL. The Terminator. Gigolo Joe. Machines that can learn from – and interact with – the world around them have long been a science-fiction staple. What was once a storytelling trope, however, is quickly becoming an everyday truth.

My kid loves bowling on the Xbox with Kinect. She takes it for granted that the Kinect can detect where she is standing and the movement of her hands. In the same way, millions of Android users rely on Google’s voice recognition technology for everyday tasks like finding directions or making phone calls.

Behind all these consumer products is a technology called “machine learning” (part of a bigger field called artificial intelligence). Machine learning is about teaching machines or computers to understand data, for example, so they can recognize voices or detect humans standing in front of a camera.

As you may imagine, machine learning is difficult; that’s why it’s only recently that we are reaping its benefits. Thanks to a combination of recent algorithmic breakthroughs and the high performance of GPUs, however, researchers have seen dramatic improvements in accuracy for machine learning problems for services that are more than just lab experiments.

Today, many companies use GPUs to build sophisticated artificial neural networks to deliver services enjoyed every day. A few examples:

• Baidu Visual Search uses GPUs to create precise image search results (Wired article)
• Microsoft Xbox Kinect enables accurate classification of body positions (Microsoft blog)
• Yandex Search uses GPUs to deliver search ranking results (Yandex blog)
• Google has built neural networks for various projects (Wired article)
• Nuance is exploring new algorithms to deliver more accurate voice-recognition products (Nuance blog)

Artificial intelligence is affecting our daily lives, and GPUs are at the heart of this revolution.

“Using GPUs for training deep neural networks has become an absolute requirement. It takes us weeks to train with GPUs, it might take us years on CPUs alone,” says Professor Rob Fergus from the Courant Institute at NYU, a research group in deep neural networks, which can be used for applications such as image recognition.

And it’s only the beginning. Beyond image search and voice recognition, future applications will include self-driving cars affordable enough to motor into the mainstream – rather than just prowl up and down California’s Highway 101 as prototypes – and intelligent recommendation engines on shopping websites. We may be many years away from computers achieving human-scale brain capabilities. But at our current pace of innovation, fueled by GPUs, the future is closer than we think.

If you are working in the field of machine learning, we’d love to hear from you in the comment box below.

Imagine wood flowing like water, cascading in a stream down ornate granite walls.

Now imagine being able to catch these pellets of wood with the flick of a fingertip, or sending dusky chunks tumbling end-over-end, altering the course of a stream made of virtual timber. It’s lumber that’s anything but lumbering.

This dramatic display was put together by Italy’s RebelDot inside Vienna, Austria’s town hall – or rathaus— earlier this summer. The trick behind this digital display of sticks: a suite of NVIDIA technologies that swiftly transformed the neo-Gothic building’s irregular architectural elements into a projection screen for an interactive display of falling wood.

NVIDIA’s PhysX physics engine was used to simulate the behaviour of rigid bodies – in this case, logs – as they rolled down intricately carved stone. Rebeldot then used hundreds of photographs to determine the geometric properties of the soaring space’s ornate surfaces using MeshLab, a widely-used piece of open-source 3D mesh processing software.

By using NVIDIA CUDA technology and a workstation equipped with an NVIDIA Quadro K5000 graphics card, the interactive agency was able to build its interactive exhibit in 25 minutes, rather than two-and-a-half days, allowing the group to set up their exhibit – allow visitors to enjoy it – over a single weekend. Not as easy as falling off a log, but close.

The result was a showstopper that drew crowds of onlookers eager to play with the digital display, which was part of a celebration of the 2013 Schweighofer Prize – a €200,000 sum awarded every two years to celebrate innovation in the European wood industry – by European wood processing company, Holzindutrie Schweighofer.

Call it interactive art that portrays wood as anything but dead.

We’re still months away from the gift-giving season, but artists and designers are putting the new NVIDIA Quadro K6000 graphics card at the top of their wishlists.

For visual professionals working in everything from VFX-heavy filmmaking to product design, project timelines are shrinking while data sets are exploding in size. The Quadro K6000 lets them push the envelope more than ever.

The Quadro K6000 redefines the possible in visual effects.

Combining the world’s most powerful GPU and the world’s largest graphics memory (12GB), the Quadro K6000 enables the quality and realism of visual work to be scaled up to unprecedented levels earlier in workflows than previously possible.

We put this new card in the hands of some of our most demanding customers and their feedback has been incredible. Check out the videos below to see how artists and designers are using the Quadro K6000 to fundamentally change how they work.

The Foundry MARI: Visual effects artists are able to create richer, more detailed character and set environments completely in CG with the Quadro K6000.

Autodesk Maya: Animators can work at previously unheard of levels of realism right inside Autodesk Maya to make better modeling decisions earlier.

RTT DeltaGen: Automakers like Nissan can now review more design iterations faster and with more realism than ever before using the Quadro K6000 in the RTT DeltaGen design review tool.

It started with a donation to the Foundation of Hospital Art. It ended with five brightly painted murals presented to a Silicon Valley medical center.

In between were smiling NVIDIA interns, smudged with paint and chattering about fish, zebras, butterflies and other creatures.

Interns hard at work painting.

Normally our summer interns are writing code or testing hardware, but one recent Friday afternoon nearly 90 of them slipped out of their cubes to help throw some paint on canvas.

NVIDIA’s University Relations team had earlier received 30 unpainted, animal-themed mural panels from the Foundation of Hospital Art. Their ultimate home would be the walls of Valley Health Center Sunnyvale.

Involving all the levels of our workforce in philanthropy is a core principle of our employee-led NVIDIA Foundation, and interns are no exception. Since the Foundation for Hospital Art is a nonprofit dedicated to cheering up the sometimes somber interiors of hospitals worldwide with colorful artwork, working with them was a good fit.

Those murals don’t paint themselves!

The blank canvas panels came in groups of six, each group making up a unified mural. Interns donned aprons, dipped brushes into paint, and worked carefully but intensely for two hours to transform the blank slates into colorful, vibrant murals.

“It means a lot that we as interns can take part in one of NVIDIA’s core values, community service,” said performance analysis intern Cecilia Carrillo. “I enjoyed the event because we got to help improve the lives of patients at Valley Health Center by making the hospital a more comforting place.”

Last week, the NVIDIA Foundation and University Relations teams, along with 10 interns, presented the murals to Valley Health Center Sunnyvale. The artwork will decorate five pediatric exam rooms at the hospital.

“Giving back is a huge part of the NVIDIA culture, which is why it was so great to introduce our interns to this,” explains Monica Spehar, recruiting manager for University Relations. “The internship program isn’t just about what it’s like to work at NVIDIA; it’s about what it’s like to be an NVIDIAN.”

Giving back at NVIDIA looks a little like this.

Virtual tank battles, $100,000 in prize money and giveaways for attendees. This is going to be good.

NVIDIA’s first-ever GeForce eSports World of Tanks Open Tournament will put an exclamation mark on the close of PAX Prime on Sunday, Sept. 1, at 7 pm PT, at Seattle’s Showbox SoDo.

The event promises to be a huge moment for fans of this massively-multiplayer game of mechanized combat.

There are two ways to tune in:

• In Person: If you’re at PAX Prime, RSVP now at http://wot100kopen.eventbrite.com/. Doors will open at 6 pm and gamers will be admitted onsite on a first-come, first-served basis. After the battle, NVIDIA, along with our tournament partners Wargaming and Twitch, will host Party of 3, the mother of all PAX parties. There will be giveaways.
• Online: If you can’t be there, watch it live on Twitch.tv on Sunday, Sept. 1, at 7 pm.

The scene: Eight years ago. Plush interior of a lightning-fast BMW. A frustrated John Danskin at the wheel.

What exasperated John wasn’t that his car wouldn’t budge, that he’d been cut off in traffic or that he neglected to bring his favorite mix disc for a long trip. He was frustrated because he couldn’t drive his new beast at its maximum speed.

“I remember thinking to myself, ‘this is a fast car, but I can’t actually go fast with it,’” says John, a 13-year veteran of NVIDIA.

Flash forward to today. John, a vice president of GPU Architecture and key thinker behind chip design here, is sitting behind the wheel of a 1964 Daytona Coupe – one that he built himself.

The Rhode Island native has taken his love of building things outside the realm of computer chips. He’s built fly rods, boats and now the Daytona, which he pieced together with the help of a car kit from Factory Five Racing.

A team player at heart, John says he loves working on projects that take impossible amounts of time to do alone but can be accomplished with the help of coworkers.

But he saw a solo mission to meet his vehicular needs. “You can’t really be intimate with something until you’ve taken it apart and put it back together again with your own two hands,” he says. “To be really intimate, figure out why the first three ways you put it together were wrong. Once you’ve done that, you can truly call that thing yours.”

Doing One Thing – Really Well

The Daytona Coupe, a highly specialized car built purely for speed, proved to be perfect for John. Whereas the standard vehicle has an interior crafted for comfort, windows designed to maximize vision, and humming and vibrations minimized, the Daytona screeches, blinds and bumps its passenger unceasingly. But John doesn’t mind – he cares solely for the Daytona’s power.

“When you’re racing, it’s okay if you can’t see anything within 100 feet of you, because if it’s closer than 100 feet it’s already past you anyways,” he says. “And besides, cars that do everything perfectly are boring. I wanted to build a car that did just one thing really well.”

John with the partially built Daytona.

When John started building the car, he employed a technique he uses in his work: removing anything from a computer chip that isn’t absolutely necessary to make it do what it’s supposed to do better. For the Daytona, that meant clearing any obstacles to making the car go faster — including some extreme measures, like tearing out the dashboard and leaving the wiring exposed.

Before building the Daytona, John had joined a local BMW club to learn how to drive on a racetrack, looking to satisfy the need for speed that couldn’t be sated elsewhere. This worked for a few years, but eventually he reached the point where he wanted to actually race – not just drive – at the track.

Which is why once a month in the summer, John now races with other amateurs. He’ll travel anywhere within 500 miles of Rhode Island to race, often matching up with the same group of people at events.

The track is ideal for testing a car, John says, “because if something goes wrong, you’ll end up spinning across the grass, not smashing into a wall.”

So far, he’s spun off the track twice with the Daytona, escaping unscathed and with no damage to the car. Although if he does damage it, that’s okay: He’s got the know-how, and the passion, to put it back together again.

In the movie ‘Blade,’ Wesley Snipes played a character with a knack for slicing up vampires with a ridiculously sharp katana. In the real world, nothing chops faster through tough computing problems for creative-class samurai than a powerful GPU.

Slim, but powerful: HP’s new WS460c Gen8 Graphics Server Blade.

Today, HP announced the updated HP WS460c Gen8 Graphics Server Blade– the first blade server to put the wickedly sharp problem-solving power of NVIDIA GRID GPUs on the virtual desktops of multiple users at the same time.

Slash past the buzzwords and the significance is plain. These servers will put powerful tools in the hands of the most demanding users – artists, designers, engineers and architects – with all the advantages of hosting and managing those desktops centrally.

With NVIDIA GRID K1 or K2 GPUs, a single blade system running virtual desktops or applications can now support multiple users per blade. It’s a simple upgrade to blade infrastructure:  new blade servers come with GRID GPUs available in side car chassis.

There’s more coming. Our goal with NVIDIA GRID: give every virtual-desktop user the graphics power they expect from their workstation or PC.

Visit the HP website for more information. 

Catch SQream and other early-stage GPU innovators this November in Tel Aviv, where we’ll host top execs from dozens of firms using GPUs to push the frontiers of computing.

The trouble with Big Data is it’s so big.

Piling up terabytes of data is easier than ever as the world grows more digital, and those digital services grow ever more connected.

The problem: all too often finding useful information takes racks full of servers. And it takes time.

An Israeli startup, SQreamTechnologies, wants to use GPUs to make the process of sifting through all those terabytes to find something useful faster and more efficient.

And while it may not be intuitive to use a technology developed for video games to crank through phone records or bank transactions, SQream CEO Ami Gal has been noodling around with the idea for more than a decade.

That’s because the parallel computing technology used by GPUs to render lush worlds and fast-paced action is also ideal for cranking through a huge number of problems simultaneously.

Gal, a serial entrepreneur with a knack for out-of-the-box thinking, gave the idea a shot more than a decade ago, in 1997, when he tried to use predecessor of GPUs to accelerate call center apps. It worked, but he couldn’t make it work quickly enough to make a difference.

Since then, GPUs have grown into the parallel processing powerhouses first Gal envisioned. Gal found that out first hand when he ran into Kostya Varkin, who was using the latest NVIDIA GPUs to tear through SQL analytics quickly and efficiently. Gal was so impressed with Varkin’s progress that he joined the company in 2010 as CEO.

The early-stage startup – based in Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv – has fewer than 20 employees, and just a handful of major pilot customers. But Gal is confident the time is finally right.

The company’s technology can already crank data 10-times faster than CPU solutions, using a skinny server rather than an entire rack full of power-sucking machines, Gal says.

He’s expanding aggressively, looking for developers who know their way around CUDA and GPUs to add to the team. With data piling up all around us at an ever faster rate, Gal is confident he’s found an idea whose time has come.

Fizzy Rockets. Roller Coaster Math. Whimsical Wind Vanes.

The folks at non-profit RAFT – or ‘Resource Area for Teaching’ – have a lot in common with NVIDIANs. They love games, and they love learning.

At NVIDIA’s headquarters, employees worked with RAFT to assemble kits teachers will use to inspire, amaze, and excite.

And that’s why NVIDIA’s Tony Tamasi – a senior VP who looks after our relationships with gaming companies – found himself last week stuffing thousands of marbles into hundreds of tiny plastic bags at our Silicon Valley head office as part of NVIDIA Foundation’s annual “Pack to School” effort.

“Don’t lose your marbles,” RAFT staffer LaVonne Simmons teased Tamasi.

Tamasi was one of 400 employees who volunteered to help assemble more than 3,300 kits such as “Critter Capsules,” – which send a marble-stuffed capsules skittering around a paper plate. These kits will be used by teachers to help excite, inspire, and amaze nearly 30,000 Bay Area students in the upcoming school year.

It’s part of an effort that – like the annual back to school ritual itself – is a global one for NVIDIA. Here are some of the other things we do to help prepare for the new school year:

China: Our Beijing office helped 150-plus grade school teachers in rural central China as a sponsor of the Cuiyongyuan Foundation’s teacher training program. The program arms teachers with modern educational tools to help more than 10,000 children in 100 poverty-stricken schools.

Taiwan: Our Taipei office donated close to $40,000 to the Child Welfare League Foundation to help support more than 700 students at seven elementary schools in remote parts of the island nation. They also spent time with students in a variety of activities, including a special outing.

NVIDIAns in Munich spent a day working at a kindergarten for kids from socially disadvantaged backgrounds

Germany: NVIDIANs in Munich spent a day working to improve a nearby kindergarten for kids from socially disadvantaged backgrounds, building a wooden playhouse, repairing fences and painting. Green t-shirt-clad kindergarteners worked side by side with the volunteers where possible, enthusiastically shouting “Unbesiegbar!” (“Invincible!”).

India: Pune employees partnered with AksharBharati, which donates books to organizations in need, to set up a library of nearly 800 books at a school serving children from nearby slums. They also worked with the students, introducing them to the books and talking to them about the importance of literacy. The office plans to set up a library at a new school each quarter.

Colorado: Looking to inspire future scientists, Fort Collins employees held a fundraiser to support a district-wide science fair for 4th and 5th graders, and volunteered to judge the entries.

Texas: Nearly 40 NVIDIANs volunteered to freshen up the campus of Brooke Elementary School in East Austin, putting in more than 250 hours landscaping and painting the school to prepare it for the coming school year.

Elsewhere in the U.S.: In its eighth year, our U.S. Field Office Backpack Drive collected enough donations to send more than 1,850 students back to school in the fall with a new backpack. More than 800 employees from 11 offices joined the effort.