Nvidia has announced that appointment of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) as its first Cuda Centre of Excellence.

Compute Unified Device Architecture (Cuda) is Nvidia's C-compiler and software development kit for developing computing applications on graphics processing units (GPUs).

GPUs lend themselves to highly parallelised computational tasks owing to the architectural differences between standard CPUs and GPUs, but it has been very difficult to access the processing power for anything that is not graphical.

"The Cuda Center of Excellence programme rewards schools that truly embrace the concept of parallell processing as the future of computing," said Dr. David Kirk, chief scientist at Nvidia.

"Schools receiving this accreditation integrate the Cuda software environment into their curriculum to help their students harness the capabilities of these new parallell processing architectures."

The Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group at UIUC was one of the first research groups to use the parallell architecture of the GPU to accelerate their research in the field of computational biophysics.

As part of the appointment Nvidia has donated $500,000 to UIUC for the development of parallel computing facilities and the continuation of its research programs.