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Video games meet enterprise technology, business: The intersection blurs more | ZDNet

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How Nvidia sees data science as its next big market Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is betting that data science will meld data centers with high-performance computing. Here’s why it makes sense.

On Gamespot

The infrastructure behind the video game industry is increasingly leading to new enterprise technology and business use cases to the point where you’ll have to pay attention to both to connect the dots for the future.

In a week in which the Game Developers Forum (see all GameSpot coverage) and Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) were happening at the same time, the overlap between the enterprise and gaming were hard to ignore. Nvidia and its graphics processors and subsequent ecosystem of developers focused on artificial intelligence. Machine learning and high-performance computing were a common thread between the two events.

Nvidia is a big driver behind this intersection of video games and the enterprise. CEO Jensen Huang outlined Nvidia’s strategy during the company’s analyst meeting. Huang’s comments related to how Nvidia got into the data center game — even more so since the company bought Mellanox. Let’s look at Huang’s approach:

“No longer was it sufficient to just accelerate graphics. We had to first simulate the physics and then accelerate the graphics. Because you have to simulate the water. You have to simulate the leaves blowing into wind. You have to simulate things, particle physics, as buildings crumbled. And so it was impossible to have animated all of that. We decided to simulate that. So we expanded the aperture of our accelerator, and we invented this idea, called CUDA, so that we could expand not just accelerating graphics, but the domain of virtual reality. About that time, when we transitioned from a graphics accelerator to a domain accelerator, we became an accelerated computing company. An accelerator accelerates a function. An accelerated computing platform accelerates a domain of applications.”

An accelerated computing company enables specific use cases via architecture more than one generalized effort.

Huang explained:

“There’s only one computer architecture that can boil the ocean, and that’s called the CPU. It’s general purpose. That’s its nature. That’s its weakness, too. Its strength is that it can run everything. It’s weakness is that it doesn’t run anything super well . . . This accelerated computing architecture must have vertical domains to focus on, otherwise known as the counter of horizontal, vertical. And so we select verticals strategically — strategically and methodically — so that we can: One, make a contribution by the time that it’s necessary. It’s sufficiently large to be able to sustain the enormous investment that we put into it. But it’s not so large as essentially a horizontal problem.”