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January 2012
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CUDA stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture, a platform to develop parallel software. The designation came about as a result of work done in the Department by Dr Ajay Joshi, Leader of the Computer Systems Engineering group. The centre will be based in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UWI St. Augustine, and Dr Joshi will be a principal investigator. This Centre will be the first and only one of its kind in the Caribbean (as will be the upcoming High Performance Facility. The Institute of Electrical & Electronic Engineers (IEEE) has developed a novel curriculum to teach parallelism within undergraduate Computer Science curricula and the new Centre plans to adopt this curriculum and develop it further. Starting with shared-memory parallelism of 4, 6 or even 46 multicores in modern CPUs, the Centre will employ massive multicores with more than 5000 cores in graphics processing units (GPUs). This effort reflects current trends in computer architecture and requires novel educational paradigms to prepare students for this challenge and associated changes in the Multiprocessor architecture, design and implementation of algorithms. This is just a beginning and hence incoming students will go through an initial tutorial training in Computer Architecture and Operating Systems. The NVIDIA CTC at UWI is currently targeting classes at graduate curriculum in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, including a planned outreach to other disciplines. The curriculum will be continually updated and will focus on hands-on activities. The Centre is in the process of deploying a Cluster X-PARC 2, an HPC cluster with NVIDIA Fermi hardware, to foster research and education in massive parallel processing as well as large computational simulations. The Department has established an area in its Laboratory to accommodate this activity and Dr Joshi has started a web page where information about the programme will be disseminated. NVIDIA link: http://research.nvidia.com/content/cuda-teaching-centers#Trinidad Web page: http://www.rndrepository.com/padlab |
The UWI has been designated a NVIDIA CUDA Teaching Centre for educational and research efforts in the field of High Performance Computing.