It has been few years since I started looking into CUDA as a way of speeding up my software. At the beginning I was impressed with the reported speedups of neural network processing, which was the main impetus for the development of GPU-accelerated Aquila software for cognitive robotics. Anthony Morse and myself did several presentations at our university and at that time CUDA was not as well-known as it is nowadays. We could clearly see the benefits of using GPUs for the sort of computations we were doing but convincing others was a little bit of a challenge back then. Later on we would set-up a new GPU cluster and started using it for the training of our humanoid robot iCub,
One day I posted a video of this training to NVIDIA Facebook page, which led to a series of events including the establishment of the new NVIDIA CUDA Teaching Center at our university. Davide Marocco and myself started a new parallel computing module (SOFT339) and as a dedicated CUDA prophet (name given by my supervisor) I am really happy to be given the opportunity to teach CUDA, reach and inspire the new generation of parallel programmers and make a difference. The students seem to be enjoying the module and I am trying to keep the material both useful and interesting.
We are definitely not stopping here, our goals are high and we plan to reach more students and companies in the very near future so stay tuned 🙂
