NVIDIA an American global technology company today announced the inaugural of the CUDA Coding Challenge, an India-wide contest to seek out the country’s most talented and innovative CUDA programmers.
CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is NVIDIA’s parallel computing platform and programming model that enables dramatic increases in computing performance by harnessing the power of the GPU. By giving growing programmers the chance to test and sharpen their CUDA programming skills, NVIDIA is seeking to prepare scores of new developers to help tackle the future’s most complicated computational challenges by harnessing the power of GPU-accelerated computing.
The challenge is open to all students pursuing higher education in engineering and science. Registrations for interested students will begin immediately on NVIDIA India’s website, and the contest will commence from 1 August. Winning teams will be awarded cash prizes of Rs 1,00,000 in total.
“India’s higher education system is the third largest in the world behind the United States and China,” said NVIDIA MD south Asia Vishal Dhupar in a press statement. “Our work force is also regarded as amongst the world’s most intellectual and innovative. Many leading Indian universities are already teaching parallel programming using GPUs, empowering tens-of-thousands of students graduating each year. With these new initiatives, we hope to create more awareness and generate further innovation around CUDA.”
Today, NVIDIA also launched a new website in a joint venture with IIT Bombay CUDA Centre of Excellence. It’s created to provide complete information about CUDA research, events, training and job-related opportunities to students, faculty and the India industry at big level.
“Software developers and researchers around the world are finding broad-ranging uses for GPU computing with CUDA,” added NVIDIA GM accelerated computing Sumit Gupta. “These new initiatives will give leaders of tomorrow a chance to use innovation and creativity to build solutions that will positively impact science and society as a whole.”
The CUDA Coding Challenge requires students to either work alone, or in pairs to build up applications on CUDA-enabled GPUs. NVIDIA will provide the initial algorithms, allowing students to optimize the given code on CUDAC/C++/Fortran to create new, inventive applications that will be judged on basis of innovation, performance and quality.
P.S.V. Nataraj, professor at the Systems and Control Engineering Group, IIT Bombay stated: “We have been working closely with NVIDIA for many years now. In fact, IIT Bombay was named the first CUDA Center of Excellence in India last year. We are now taking this collaboration to a new level, starting a new chapter for GPU and CUDA related initiatives in India.”