Recommender systems help people find what they’re looking for among an exponentially growing number of options. They are a critical component for driving user engagement on many online platforms. With the rapid growth in scale of industry datasets, deep learning (DL) recommender models, which capitalize on large amounts of training data, have started to show advantages over traditional methods.
]]>This post was originally published on the Mellanox blog. In my previous Kubernetes post, Provision Bare-Metal Kubernetes Like a Cloud Giant!, I discussed the benefits of using BlueField DPU-programmable SmartNICs to simplify provisioning of Kubernetes clusters in bare-metal infrastructures. A key takeaway from this post was the current rapid shift toward bare metal Kubernetes...
]]>Figure 1. 5G wireless uses an open and cloud-native radio area network (CloudRAN). NVIDIA Mellanox 5T for 5G technology provides a real-time and high-performance solution for building an efficient, time-synchronized CloudRAN infrastructure. Time synchronization and achieving high time accuracy for network traffic between O-RAN 7.2x compliant front-haul, mid-haul, and back-haul components in a...
]]>This post was originally published on the Mellanox blog. XDP (eXpress Data Path) is a programmable data path in the Linux kernel network stack. It provides a framework to BPF and can enable high performance packet processing at runtime. XDP works in concert with the Linux network stack and is not a kernel bypass. Because XDP runs in the kernel network driver, it can read the ethernet frames from...
]]>Figure 1. Stack image showing layers involved while running Linux AI frameworks in WSL 2 containers. In response to popular demand, Microsoft announced a new feature of the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2)—GPU acceleration—at the Build conference in May 2020. This feature opens the gate for many compute applications, professional tools, and workloads currently available only on Linux...
]]>Imagine an AI program that can understand language better than humans can. Imagine building your own personal Siri or Google Search for a customized domain or application. Google BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) provides a game-changing twist to the field of natural language processing (NLP). BERT runs on supercomputers powered by NVIDIA GPUs to train its huge neural...
]]>During the 2020 NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference keynote address, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang introduced the new NVIDIA A100 GPU based on the NVIDIA Ampere GPU architecture. In this post, we detail the exciting new features of the A100 that make NVIDIA GPUs an ever-better powerhouse for computer vision workloads. We also showcase two recent CV research projects from NVIDIA Research...
]]>Today, smartphones, the most popular device for taking pictures, can capture images as large as 4K UHD (3840×2160 image), more than 25 MB of raw data. Even considering the embarrassingly low HD resolution (1280×720), a raw image requires more than 2.5 MB of storage. Storing as few as 100 UHD images would require almost 3 GB of free space. Clearly, if you store data this way, you quickly run out of...
]]>According to surveys, the average person produces 1.2 trillion images that are captured by either a phone or a digital camera. The storage of such images, especially in high-resolution raw format, uses lots of memory. JPEG refers to the Joint Photographic Experts Group, which celebrated its 25th birthday in 2017. The JPEG standard specifies the codec, which defines how an image is compressed into...
]]>Level-of-detail (LOD) refers to replacing high-resolution meshes with lower-resolution meshes in the distance, where details may not be significant. This technique can help reduce memory footprint and geometric aliasing. Most importantly, it has long been used to improve rasterization performance in games. But does that apply equally to ray tracing? The render time for rasterization is...
]]>Are you an experienced Minecraft content creator, but new to physically based materials? Or someone who just wants to learn the basics behind physically based rendering to create your own PBR resource packs? Great! This talk is for you. In “Creating Physically Based Materials for Minecraft with RTX...
]]>There’s an important technology that is commonly used in autonomous driving, medical imaging, and even Zoom virtual backgrounds: semantic segmentation. That’s the process of labelling pixels in an image as belonging to one of N classes (N being any number of classes), where the classes can be things like cars, roads, people, or trees. In the case of medical images, classes correspond to different...
]]>This is the third post in the CUDA Refresher series, which has the goal of refreshing key concepts in CUDA, tools, and optimization for beginning or intermediate developers. Ease of programming and a giant leap in performance is one of the key reasons for the CUDA platform’s widespread adoption. The second biggest reason for the success of the CUDA platform is the availability of a broad and rich...
]]>Windows Virtual Desktop If you’re supporting the recent influx in remote work, you’ve probably noticed that business applications are more graphics-heavy than ever before. Applications such as Microsoft Office, Google Chrome, and PDF readers now offer graphics-rich features that require more power. In addition, 4K and multiple high-resolution monitors, as well as multimedia streaming...
]]>Recommender systems drive every action that you take online, from the selection of this web page that you’re reading now to more obvious examples like online shopping. They play a critical role in driving user engagement on online platforms, selecting a few relevant goods or services from the exponentially growing number of available options. On some of the largest commercial platforms...
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