Nvidia moves GPU Technology conference date

Pushing the next conference from September 2011 to May 2012 gives time for regional GPU events.

Nvidia is moving its popular GPU Technology Conference (GTC)  from September to May, with the next event scheduled for May 14-17, 2012.

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang shows off his new (temporary) Tegra tattoo at the 2010 GPU Technology Conference. Despite the brief plug for Nvidia's mobile CPU, most of his presentation was about GPU compute technology. (Image courtesy Nvidia)

The company decided to move the event to give staff a breather from a heavy existing conference schedule in the third and fourth quarters, to the second quarter of the year which was more open on Nvidia’s calendar. The resulting gap also gives Nvidia the opportunity to do regional GPU Technology conferences. In May Nvidia did regional GTC meetings in Singapore, Taipei, and Tel Aviv, with Tokyo (July 22) and Beijing (December 15) on the schedule. More than 1,000 academic and commercial attendees were at the May events.

Moving to May also means GTC does not bump up against the annual Supercomputing Conference (SC) . Going forward Nvidia will use SC as its fall venue for GPU computing, and the North American GTC will become an annual spring event. The next SC will be November 12-18 in Seattle.

The previously co-located Accelerated High Performance Computing (HPC) Symposium organized by Los Alamos National Laboratory will also move to the new schedule, as will the new InPar 2012 academic conference, geared towards providing a first-tier venue for peer-reviewed publications in the field of innovative parallel computing.

Last year, the GTC event in San Jose offered thousands of attendees more than 280 hours of content intended primarily for computational scientists, engineers and developers who want to better understand how the GPU is transforming scientific, visual and technical computing. Attendance at the 2010 event grew more than 50 percent compared with 2009, and further growth is anticipated.

Sponsors for GTC 2012 include HP, Microsoft, Supermicro, PNY, Adobe, Dell, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lenovo, Caps, Bull, Synnex, Next IO, GE Intelligent Platforms, Appro and AMAX.