About the CUDA Research Center at Durham University

Durham University was recently awarded the highly coveted NVIDIA CUDA Research Centre status as part of a joint bid by Dr Nigel Dipper, Professor Georgios Theodoropoulos and Professor Stewart Clark.

High performance computing (HPC) plays a vital role in research at Durham University. Whilst this is dominated by applications in the sciences, the importance of HPC in the humanities and business analytics is rapidly expanding. The availability of HPC has been revolutionized by the emergence of GP-GPU hardware led by NVIDIA. Many research groups across the university have invested in NVIDIA hardware and in training staff to program this using CUDA. A wide variety of world leading research with substantial impact has been made possible by this investment from both the university and the UK research councils.

The applications of NVIDIA hardware and CUDA at Durham are indeed multi-disciplinary. Within the Physics department, they are used by cosmologists to facilitate the study of the origins of the universe, by materials scientists to calculate the properties of materials using quantum mechanics, by nuclear fusion engineers to analyse data from plasmas in tokomaks and by instrument scientists to handle ‘big data’ from adaptive optics systems in astronomical instruments on the worlds largest telescopes. GPUs find extensive use in Engineering and Computer Science for landscape evolution modeling, for application in computer vision, in image and video processing and in tsunami prediction, and in Chemistry for molecular dynamics simulations.

For instructions on how to utilise the NCC, please see the following link: https://www.dur.ac.uk/resources/iarc/NCCDOCUMENTATION.pdf