Inaugural NVIDIA GRID Community Advisor 

Recently I was selected as a member of the inaugural group of the NVIDIA GRID Community Advisors. This is a great honor for me and I feel extremely fortunate to be one of the twenty individuals selected for the program.

“The [NVIDIA GRID Community Advisor Program] brings together the talents of individuals who have invested significant time and resources to become experts in NVIDIA products and solutions. Together, they give the entire NVIDIA GRID ecosystem access to product management, architects and support managers to help ensure we [NVIDIA] build the right products.”

Looking back I never would have expected this designation. I remember, in college, NVIDIA was known for its gaming GPUs. When I would talk with my friends who participated in the K-State Gamers Board (http://www.kgb-lan.net/) with me, it always seemed to be about frame rates and polygon draw capabilities of GPUs. Not to mention, who was ordering the next latest and greatest GPU for their gaming rig. I feel many still think its about gaming when you mention NVIDIA or GPUs. For me that perspective changed about four years ago when I was sent to Houston with the task of building some specialized GPU enabled desktops. Ever sense then I’ve been coming up with new ways to leverage GPUs that stretch reality (and maybe even virtual reality). Who would have thought building some VMs would change my perspective on GPUs.

What excites me most about this program is the opportunity to collaborate with NVIDIA and the other advisors to leverage GPU technologies so as to change computing, not just gaming or even virtual desktops, but all of computing from driving a car to curing zika.

I remember growing up studying basic electronics (grade 3 time frame), and discovering the basic principals of how micro processors worked. My mind was blown, and it felt as if I had been dropped into the matrix, nothing but zeros and ones whizzing through electronic path ways.I felt that same joy when I learned how GPUs leverage dynamic parallelism for processing (or see video below). And I am again feeling that exuberance as a member of this group.

So what can you expect from me around GPUs in the coming months? There are some very exciting things NVIDIA will be announcing (yes that’s all I can tell you right now) that I hope to blog on. I’ve been following their advancement for a while and am eagerly awaiting that announcement. In addition, I will be attending the LISA conference in December and leading a workshop on GPUs for the data center. I also have a bunch of brainy stuff I want to blog on around GPUs and data processing/handling/encryption.

Of course none of this would be possible without those who encouraged and challenged me to get this far. To all of them, from my parents to those I’ve only met on twitter thank you.  I hope the challenges continue so that I may share the new and exciting fruits of these challenges with everyone.

Tony