Featured Speakers

David Kirk
NVIDIA Fellow and former NVIDIA Chief Scientist

The Power of Heterogeneous Computing
Modern GPUs are revolutionizing scientific visualization, visual effects, and many other applications in computer graphics. They are accelerating routine processes and revealing new possibilities that were only futuristic speculation a few years ago. Traditional graphics processors were special-purpose, hardwired devices that supported a limited range of graphics applications. Now they are obsolete, replaced by fully programmable, massively parallel, floating-point processors that accelerate many applications by two orders of magnitude or more.

In this featured talk, David Kirk reviews the evolution of GPU technology and shares his vision of how current work in academic and industrial labs around the world will be applied to future generations of computer graphics systems.

David Kirk is an NVIDIA Fellow and served from 1997 to 2009 as NVIDIA's chief scientist, a role in which he led development of graphics technology for today's most popular consumer-entertainment platforms.

In 2009, he received the California Institute of Technology's Distinguished Alumni Award, its highest honor, for his work in the graphics-technology industry. He was elected in 2006 to the National Academy of Engineering for his role in bringing high-performance graphics to personal computers. In 2002, he received the ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award for his role in bringing high-performance computer graphics systems to the mass market.