Nvidia Corp. said at its GPU Technology Conference that top enterprise and mobile application companies are using Tesla graphics processing units (GPUs) to tackle big data analytics and advanced search for both consumer and commercial applications.

Shazam, Salesforce.com and Cortexica are at the forefront of companies expanding the use of GPUs beyond their traditional role of processing massive data sets and complex algorithms for high performance computing science and engineering applications. They rely on Nvidia Tesla GPU accelerators for areas as diverse as audio search, big data analytics and image recognition.

"GPU accelerators provide great value to applications with lots of data or computations. A growing number of applications that provide mobile service and social media analysis have both. And that's prompting their providers to turn to GPU accelerators as they scale up their infrastructure to meet growing demand," said Sumit Gupta, general manager of the Tesla accelerated computing business at Nvidia.

GPUs Used to Search for Music

Shazam – one of the top five music applications in the Apple App Store and Google Play store – uses GPU accelerators to rapidly search and identify songs from its 27 million track database. Using a mobile phone or tablet, the app's 300 million-plus users capture brief samples of music, which are then matched with an acoustic fingerprint.

With more than 10 million song searches a day, 2 million new users joining the service every week and its database having doubled over the last year, Shazam is growing rapidly. By accelerating the search and matching process, Tesla GPUs enable Shazam to maintain a low-cost server infrastructure that scales with the company's dramatic growth.

"GPUs enable us to handle our tremendous processing needs at a substantial cost savings, delivering twice the performance per dollar compared to a CPU-based system. We are adding millions of video and foreign language audio tracks to our existing services, and GPU accelerators give us a way to achieve scalable growth," said Jason Titus, chief technology officer of Shazam Entertainment.

Real-Time Twitter Analysis

Salesforce.com uses GPU accelerators to help major international brands, including Cisco, Dell and Gatorade, monitor and analyze more than 500 million daily tweets for brand, product, and service and support issues.

Nvidia GPUs enable Salesforce.com to deliver insights almost 10 minutes faster than with a comparable CPU-based system. In addition, GPUs provide enough headroom for the company to scale with the exponential growth of Twitter and the increasing demand for advanced social media by business customers.

See It, Search It

Cortexica's mobile application makes it effortless for consumers to find and purchase goods they like. Consumers can photograph shirts or similar items using their mobile phones or tablets, and the app searches through an online database of apparel to instantly find matches available for purchase from online retailers.

With GPU accelerators, Cortexica can run complex visual object recognition algorithms on a modest amount of server hardware to enable real-time searches against a database of millions of images.

"GPUs are fundamental to our success. GPU accelerators run our complex bio-inspired algorithms 30 times faster than CPUs, giving our users the best, fastest and most accurate consumer experience," said Iain McCready, chief executive officer at Cortexica.

Tags: Nvidia, Kepler, Tesla, GPGPU