University of Malta awarded 'CUDA Research Centre' title

The Institute of Space Science and Astronomy (ISSA), in collaboration with the University of Malta’s Department of Physics and the Faculty of Information and Communications Technology, announces that the University of Malta has been awarded the title of "CUDA Research Center" by NVIDIA.

NVIDIA is a world-leading manufacturer of Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) and provider of parallel processing capabilities to researchers and scientists worldwide. This prestigious title is awarded to research groups at universities in recognition of the world changing research being undertaken using NVIDIA's massively parallel CUDA compute platform and NVIDIA GPUs.

This title has been awarded to several outstanding institutions and universities such as Oxford University, Duke University and ETH Zurich.

ISSA is applying NVIDIA technologies to address the exceptional computational requirements of large-scale radio telescopes, with special emphasis on the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), where GPUs are being considered as one of the primary architectures to meet these demanding challenges.

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 of Malta to perform a multitude of computationally-intensive tasks, including combining signals from hundreds of antennas, generating radio images of the universe, detecting the occurrence of cataclysmic events and searching for extraterrestrial life.

This title will enable the University of Malta 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.