An increasing emphasis on mobile applications is emerging for some users of high-performance computing as there are new, innovative ways to access user interfaces to sophisticated platforms and input or extract information that resides on the cloud in real-time.
GPU giant NVIDIA’s CEO sees these (and a much wider range of general consumer applications) as the way forward via the parallel processing thrust that is already pushing leading supercomputers and desktop machines.
According to NVIDIA, the company is seeking to branch out with CUDA, extending it to power mobile devices of all sizes in order to allow for a richer assortment of multimedia-heavy applications.
For example, NVIDIA’s CEO asked us imagine browsing in a wine shop for the right bottle for the night’s event. We can snap a photo of a bottle and an app will recognize it, interface with a service based in the cloud and return information about that wine, including pricing and drinking information.
As CEO Jen-Hsun Huang’s stated during this video interview with IDG, “All of a sudden this mobile device gives you the capabilities of Iron Man’s helmet. You’re looking through this mobile camera and information about your world is popping up…so computer vision and your mobile device connected to a supercomputer in the cloud allows us to provide that experience that I think is going to be utterly shocking.”
This is not something that we’ll see overnight; Huang estimates it’s still a couple of years away but he admits to being excited about building the infrastructure to support this movement toward more robust capabilities delivered via the cloud.
As CIO Magazine reported, NVIDIA’s focus in the mobile sphere is on its Arm-based Tegra processor, which is already being used in a number of tablet machines. Chances are good that number will be more apparent following the Consumer Electronics event in January.