NVIDIA's 9th annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC18) began in San Jose today as thousands of players across every area of the IT industry gathered at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center.
It is shaping up to be an event and a half with over 8000 attendees, 150 exhibitors and 600 hours of sessions.
They are all here to see and hear about the latest in AI, deep learning, and any one of the considerable number of verticals that are supported by NVIDIA's tech.
Australia and New Zealand are not going unrepresented.
The Australian Centre for Robotic Vision is here presenting on how they used deep learning to become the Amazon Robotics Challenge champions last year.
Kiwi startup Nyriad also here with their new partners Advanced HPC to show off their new offering - Orion, an NVIDIA GPU-accelerated storage system.
The obligatory Gear Store is selling the usual fare of mugs, tees and golf balls, plus the NVIDIA Shield, a TV streaming solution, and the Jetson TX2 Developer Kit for those who are looking to take a deeper dive into the NVIDIA ecosystem.
A pop-up bookstore has a range of relevant literature including Tolga Soyata's 'GPU Parallel Program Development using CUDA', expected to be the top-seller according to the store attendant.
For something a little more whimsical, motion and facial expression tracking systems were on display in the main area, turning attendees into squatting chickens-
and describing their facial expressions with emoji-
Among the Monday morning presentations, NVIDIA director of developer programs Will Ramey's Demystifying Deep Learning offered a straight-forward overview of the history and applications of deep learning.
It has been five years since the 'Deep Learning Big Bang', as Ramey described it - the moment when big data, algorithm advancement, and GPU speed came together to allow the level of processing that the revolutionary technology required.
Ramey outlined how deep learning is easier, scalable, faster, retrainable and reusable, which means that the focus can be on managing, maintaining and curating the program.
This is shaping up to be the theme of the conference - how can GPU technology and all that comes with it help shape the next step in the evolution of IT?
Tomorrow morning, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang will be delivering the opening keynote, which is looking set to make big announcements that answer exactly that question.
More coverage of #GTC18 to come this week.
