GPUs Reshape Computing

NVidia's Titan X graphics card, featuring the company's Pascal-powered graphics processing unit driven by 3,584 CUDA cores running at 1.5GHz. As researchers continue to push the boundaries of neural networks and deep learning--particularly in speech recognition and natural language processing, image and pattern recognition, text and data analytics, and other complex areas--they are constantly on the lookout for new and better ways to extend and expand computing capabilities. For decades, the gold standard has been high-performance computing (HPC) clusters, which toss huge amounts of processing power at problems--albeit at a prohibitively high cost. This approach has helped fuel advances across a wide swath of fields, including weather forecasting, financial services, and energy exploration. However, in 2012, a new method emerged.