NVIDIA Pascal Architecture

NVIDIA Pascal Architecture

NVIDIA CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang revealed details of Pascal and the company’s updated processor roadmap in front of a crowd of 4,000 during his keynote address at the GPU Technology Conference, in Silicon Valley.

“It will benefit from a billion dollars worth of refinement because of R&D done over the last three years,” he told the audience.

Pascal Architecture

The revolutionary NVIDIA Pascal architecture is purpose-built to be the engine of computers that learn, see and simulate our world - a world with infinite appetite for computing.

The first product based on the Pascal architecture is the NVIDIA Tesla P100 accelerator. With an 18 billion transistor Pascal GPU, NVIDIA NVLINK high performance interconnect that greatly accelerates GPU peer-to-peer and GPU-to-CPU communications, and exceptional power efficiency based 16nm FinFET technology, the Tesla P100 is not only the most powerful, but also the most advanced GPU accelerator ever built.

NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1080

The NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1080 enables developers to experience the Pascal architecture's amazing performance and advance capabilities. For game and accelerated computing developers alike - the GeForce GTX 1080 is the weapon of choice for your desktop or workstation.

Random Numbers

Random Numbers

Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.  -John Von Neumann, 1951

A random number is a number generated by a process, whose outcome is unpredictable, and which cannot be subsequentially reliably reproduced. This definition works fine provided that one has some kind of a black box – such a black box is usually called a random number generator – that fulfills this task.

However, if one were to be given a number, it is simply impossible to verify whether it was produced by a random number generator or not. In order to study the randomness of the output of such a generator, it is hence absolutely essential to consider sequences of numbers.

Random Number Generator

A random-number generator is a computational or physical device designed to generate a sequence of numbers or symbols that can not be reasonably predicted better than by a random chance.

Various applications of randomness have led to the development of several different methods for generating random data, of which some have existed since ancient times, among their ranks are well known "classic" examples, including the rolling of dice, coin flipping as well as countless other techniques. Because of the mechanical nature of these techniques, generating large numbers of sufficiently random numbers (important in statistics) required a lot of work and/or time. Thus, results would sometimes be collected and distributed as random number tables. 

Nowadays, after the advent of computational random-number generators, a growing number of government-run lotteries and lottery games have started using RNGs instead of more traditional drawing methods. RNGs are also used to determine the odds of modern slot machines.

Several computational methods for random-number generation exist. Many fall short of the goal of true randomness, although they may meet, with varying success, some of the statistical tests for randomness intended to measure how unpredictable their results are (that is, to what degree their patterns are discernible). However, carefully designed cryptographically secure computationally based methods of generating random numbers also exist, such as those based on the Yarrow algorithm, the Fortuna (PRNG), and others.