The inflatable black cone in the corridor of the GPU Technology Conference along with the table piled high with 3D glasses was a dead giveaway: yet another 3D demonstration. These are fairly common at this conference, and the first keynote address was full of astounding graphic routines – all of them in stunning 3D. So what could Micoy (the owners of the aforementioned tent) add to the mix?

The Portland Group (PGI) has received a fair amount of attention at the 2010 GPU Technology Conference in San Jose. The company announced that they are going to offer a CUDA C compiler for garden-variety x86-based systems. This will allow developers to use the same code they developed using CUDA for GPUs (albeit recompiled) on x86 boxes – including clusters.

Another action-packed day at the 2010 GPU Tech Conference in San Jose... toward the end of the day, we sat down with Andy Keane, NVIDIA’s GM of the Tesla GPU business unit and talked about a wide variety of issues. It’s been a busy week for Andy, given that his product is the focus of attention all this week.

I stopped by the Oil & Gas track at the 2010 GPU Technology Conference this morning and learned quite a bit about the key drivers on the exploration side of the industry. I already knew the key drivers on the distribution side of the business – potato chips, watery fountain drinks, and herbal energy pills – but that was assumedly being covered in a different breakout session. In this session, the speaker, from the exploration arm of oil giant Schlumberger, did a great job of laying out the big picture and relating it to their computing challenges.

Today we had NVIDIA’s Ujesh Desai give us a recap of Tuesday's events at the GPU Technology Conference. He’s the VP of Product Marketing for all NVIDIA products – we covered that topic in detail right off the bat. We also talked about how the GPU conference has taken off this year, hit on some of the announcements unveiled today, and discussed some of the sessions we attended.

I didn’t manage to work my new catch phrase, “GPU-riffic!”  into the video. This is mainly because I shot the video before the evening cocktail hour, which, strangely enough, is when I came up with the idea.

I’m planning to seed it throughout the conference tomorrow and, with luck, it will become one of those word pairings that sets your teeth on edge the second you hear it.