The University of Pittsburgh's Department of Computer Science in the School of Information Sciences has been selected as a 2011-12 Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) Teaching Center by NVIDIA, the world leader in visual and high-performance computing. This award recognizes institutions that have integrated and shown a commitment to teaching parallel computing, an architectural concept that allows computers to simultaneously run very large programs and multiple applications on multiple processing units.

"We're honored to receive this award," said Sangyeun Cho, associate professor of computer science and author of the CUDA proposal. "With the changing demands of computer uses, we encourage our students to gain experience with higher level programming languages for parallel computing, such as CUDA C/C++,"

As a recognized CUDA Teaching Center, the University will receive more than $25 thousand worth of CUDA-enabled graphics processing units, a commonly used device for creating strong visuals on mobile phones, computers, and game consoles. Funding will also support a teaching assistant, an expansive CUDA teaching kit that includes textbooks and software licenses as well as access to NVIDIA's remotely accessible testing for students to assess their CUDA programming skills. Additional hardware will be provided upon request.