Nvidia: Open Source Ecosystem

Chapter 1. The GPU Computing Landscape and NVIDIA’s Open-Source Bet

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This will be the 1st chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you’d like to be actively involved in reviewing and commenting on this draft, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

Nvidia has changed the world. If you are reading this book, that idea hardly comes as news to you. Through reading this book you will become more familiar with the company, with their core products, and most importantly, intimately familiar with the vast array of software they make freely available. This knowledge will help you make the most of whatever Nvidia hardware you have access to, and help you expedite any software development tasks that benefit from extensive amounts of numerical computation.

This introductory chapter is unique within this book, focusing on the broader context of the company, of its history, and the economics behind it. We aim to in part answer the question of, why, why Nvidia invests so much in open source that we have a book to write in the first place. Subsequent chapters focus more on the individual repositories, the problems they solve and how the technologies enable it. So if this introductory ...