NVIDIA
NVIDIA Corporation is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It’s best known for:
- GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) → powering gaming, professional visualization, and AI
- CUDA platform → enabling General Purpose GPU (GPGPU) computing
- AI and HPC solutions → hardware + software stack for deep learning, simulation, and data centers
Today, NVIDIA is a leader in AI computing, supercomputing, autonomous vehicles, and data center acceleration.
Short History of NVIDIA
- 1993 → Founded by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem.
- 1995 → First product: NV1 graphics card (not very successful).
- 1999 → Launch of the GeForce 256, the world’s first "GPU".
- 2006 → Introduction of CUDA, revolutionizing GPGPU computing.
- 2010s → GPUs adopted in deep learning, HPC, and scientific computing.
- 2017–2020 → Rise of Volta, Turing, and Ampere architectures, AI-focused with Tensor Cores.
- 2022+ → Release of Hopper and Ada Lovelace architectures, dominance in AI supercomputing (e.g., powering ChatGPT training clusters).
- Today → NVIDIA is central to AI, HPC, robotics, data centers, and autonomous driving.
NVIDIA HPC Libraries & Software Ecosystem
NVIDIA provides a comprehensive HPC software stack, often bundled as part of NVIDIA HPC SDK. These libraries accelerate linear algebra, deep learning, signal processing, communication, and parallel programming.
Core HPC Libraries
- cuBLAS → GPU-accelerated BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms).
- cuSOLVER → Dense & sparse linear algebra solvers (LU, QR, eigenvalue problems).
- cuSPARSE → Sparse matrix computations.
- cuFFT → Fast Fourier Transforms on GPUs.
- cuRAND → Random number generation (pseudo & quasi-random).
- cuTENSOR → High-performance tensor operations for HPC & AI.
AI & Deep Learning Libraries
- cuDNN → Deep Neural Network primitives (convolutions, pooling, RNNs).
- TensorRT → Inference optimization and deployment.
- NCCL (NVIDIA Collective Communications Library) → Multi-GPU and multi-node communication (all-reduce, broadcast, etc.).
HPC SDK & Tools
NVIDIA HPC SDK → Compilers, libraries, and tools for C, C++, Fortran on GPUs/CPUs.
- Includes nvfortran, nvcc, nvc++ compilers.
Nsight Systems / Nsight Compute → Profiling and debugging tools.
CUDA Toolkit → Core developer toolkit with compiler, debugger, profiler, and libraries.
Other HPC/AI Frameworks & Platforms
- NVIDIA Magnum IO → I/O and communication acceleration for HPC clusters.
- NVIDIA Triton Inference Server → Deploy trained AI models at scale.
- NVIDIA Omniverse → Simulation and collaboration platform (used in robotics, digital twins).
- NVIDIA RAPIDS → GPU-accelerated data science and analytics libraries (cuDF, cuML, cuGraph).