The University has been awarded the title of CUDA Research Center by NVIDIA, a world-leading manufacturer of graphical processing units (GPUs) and provider of parallel processing capabilities to researchers and scientists worldwide.
The prestigious title is awarded to research groups at several outstanding institutions and universities in recognition of research they have undertaken using NVIDIA’s CUDA compute platform and GPUs.
The Institute of Space Science and Astronomy (ISSA), in collaboration with the University’s Department of Physics and the Faculty of Information and Communications Technology, is currently applying NVIDIA technologies for the exceptional computational requirements of large-scale radio telescopes, such as the Square Kilometer Array.
Through local research, as well as collaboration with several international institutions, ISSA has made significant advances in meeting these requirements.
High-performance algorithms and pipelines have been developed at the University to perform a multitude of computationally-intensive tasks, including combining signals from hundreds of antennas, generating radio images of the universe, detecting cataclysmic events and searching for extraterrestrial life.
The title will enable the University to remain at the forefront of research into cutting-edge technologies by writing accelerated parallel algorithms which can leverage the multi-core architectures of current and future GPUs, deploying these algorithms in real-world environments and performing the necessary tuning for future GPU architectural changes.
Anyone interested in the GPU-related work being conducted at the University may e-mail Alessio Magro at alessio.magro@um.edu.mt.