One of the most interesting hardware designs at the 2010 GPU Tech Conference came out of Russia – Moscow, to be specific. T-Platforms has engineered the traditional blade and associated heat dissipation hardware in a way that allows far more gear to be placed in a standard rack.

Okay, let’s put it on the table: when the conversation turns to cutting-edge x86 server design and innovation, the name “Dell” doesn’t come up all that often. Their reputation was made on delivering decent products quickly at a low cost. I see that opinion in all of our x86 customer-based research; it’s even something that Dell employees will cop to.

That said, two of the most innovative and cutting-edge designs on the GPU Tech Conference show floor were sitting in the Dell booth, and that’s the topic of this video blog.

IBM made big news on the first day of the show by announcing that they will be rolling out an NVIDIA Fermi-based expansion blade. While it’s not formally announced yet (plan is for 4Q), they had one at the show and walked me through it for the video.

Ever have that feeling that you’ve seen a face before, but just can’t place it? Is it someone you knew in high school, or someone you saw featured on TV as a crazed serial killer? This won’t be a problem in the future, thanks to the folks at Australian think tank NICTA – with an assist from GPUs.

In the “Enabling Large-Scale CCTV Face Recognition” session, the NICTA-ees outlined some basic problems addressed by their technology. The first is that our security watch lists are growing – the U.S. terror watch list now numbers 1.5 million people, and Interpol is looking out for as many as 7 million unsavory characters.

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…

Those of you interested in what it really takes to bring up a massive system don’t want to miss the “Lessons Learned Deploying the World’s First GPU-Based Petaflop System” session. In it, NVIDIA’s senior hardware architect Dale Southard discusses his experience with China’s Nebulae supercomputer – which, in addition to being the #2 system on the Top500, was also probably the quickest big build of all time at around three months total.