New Solutions for Software’s Hardest Challenges

Submitted by Sam on Mon, 09/28/2009 - 08:56

While we have become desensitized to frequent change and rapid innovation in technology, one 40-year-old trend we’ve also grown accustomed to -- some might say taken for granted -- is hitting a wall: ever-increasing CPU clock rates. To get around this, hardware companies like Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA are putting more cores on every chip -- but to take advantage of all these cores, the industry must solve significant parallel programming problems. Elemental’s solution to this challenge has been to hire engineers who fundamentally understand the underlying parallel hardware architectures of the chips they are programming.

Fortune Brainstorm Tech logo

This is a trend we expect to permeate the software industry over the next few decades; read more in Elemental's guest post today on Fortune's Brainstorm Blog.

Elemental Accelerator Product Tour Video

Submitted by Sam on Mon, 08/24/2009 - 15:38

As you may expect, video is near and dear to our hearts at Elemental. Those who have been following us for years will certainly recall the original Badaboom commercials, which tended to incite strong reactions: some people loved 'em, others thought they were too corny. We believe our newest foray into production is consistent with the professional grade product it represents.

With the Elemental Accelerator product tour video, we wanted to increase the use of motion graphics to create a visceral, impactful illustration of the power of our GPU-accelerated software. Lisa, product manager, and Julie, communications manager, drove the process working closely with local production company Funnelbox Studios to create a unique, professional overview of Elemental Accelerator in 2 short minutes. Check it out and let us know what you think!

Elemental Accelerator Product Tour Screenshot

Back to School

Submitted by Sam on Wed, 02/18/2009 - 12:29

A long, long, long time ago I applied to graduate school. One of my top choices was the University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne, which has one of the best engineering programs around. You may have heard of the web browser? Student Marc Andreessen co-wrote the first one -- well, the first usable one -- there in the early 90s. Sadly I didn't end up going to UIUC, but the school now has one of the top parallel programs in the country. So, how is this relevant to Elemental? Well, UIUC was recently named the world's first CUDA Center of Excellence by NVIDIA. Dr. Wen-mei Hwu has put together a terrific course on programming massively parallel processors, ECE498, and best of all the slides and lecture audio are all available online. When Elemental started building our GPU-accelerated video software we used Dr. Hwu's slides as a reference to get familiar with NVIDIA's GPU architecture in a hurry. It's a terrific resource for all aspiring parallel programmers. 11 years after applying, I finally had the opportunity last week to visit UIUC's campus. The university is putting on a special Parallel at Illinois seminar series, entitled "The Need for Speed: Understanding Computing Performance from an Applications Perspective." Dr. Hwu and Dr.

Sneak Peek at Doubling Performance

Submitted by Jesse on Fri, 10/31/2008 - 11:20

Now that we have some products out the door, we have been focusing on making the core technology even faster than ever using off-the-shelf NVIDIA GPUs.  One of the biggest boosts in speed will come from taking advantage of multiple GPUs in the system.  Here is a sneak peek of what we are doing to leverage a multi-GPU system. Multi-Movie Parallel Transcode The most straightforward way to take advantage of multiple GPUs in the system is to send separate transcode jobs to each GPU.  This means one GPU could be transcoding one movie while another one can transcode a second one each at their already very fast speeds.  We have been prototyping this using Badaboom already by launching 2 Badabooms each using a different GPU in the system transcoding different movies.   Doing this essentially doubles the already fast speed achieved with Badaboom.

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