Jensen Identified India's Potential Back In 2004: Vishal Dhupar, NVIDIA

When you think of NVIDIA, you undoubtedly end up thinking about how it introduced GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) in 1999 and changed the world of computing and gaming forever. Today, the Jensen Huang-led company is at the forefront of GPU innovation and cutting-edge AI technology.

As the world waits for the NVIDIA GTC 2022 (September 19-22) to start, BW Businessworld’s Rohit Chintapali got in touch with Vishal Dhupar, Managing Director of NVIDIA, South Asia. In this brief interaction, Vishal spoke on NVIDIA’s foundational role in ushering in the era of quantum computing and the importance of the upcoming GTC. Read on for excerpts from the interview.

In the age of supercomputers, why do we need quantum computing?

Here is what is happening – a promise is being delivered. As we have moved from one qubit to two qubits, to hundreds of qubits, the industry and academia has got a lot of research papers now. And it's really showing to you that we will be able to solve and find the answers to humanity’s problems much quicker with quantum computing. But the practitioners know that this can only be done when we have millions and millions of qubits, which are error corrected, connected with logical qubits in a fault-tolerant way. We are some distance away from that happening but we also know that this will require a different architecture, different types of algorithms and more importantly building communities of developers who can build their applications for this environment.

We at NVIDIA, introduced the Quantum Optimized Device Architecture (QODA), which aims to make quantum computing more accessible by creating a coherent hybrid quantum-classical programming model. Its an open, unified environment that’s intended to raise the bar of scientific productivity and enable larger scale in quantum research.

Could you tell us about the work that NVIDIA undertakes in India for the world?

Much before it became fashionable to bring high-value engineering into India, Jensen (founder and CEO of NVIDIA) came here back in 2004 and identified that the country had talent which could benefit the work that NVIDIA does. Today, one out of every four NVIDIAns are based in India. From conceptualising, design for the new architecture, validating those architectures and their testing – all of these happen in India. Moreover, two-thirds of our company is about software and much of that work also gets represented in India.

What are you hoping that the Indian community can take away from the upcoming GTC 2022?

Jensen basically puts his vision on the ground at GTC every year and as he does this, he also reports back on what we have achieved based on previous comments because the event has large sets of people who come in, representing researchers, industries, technology experts. People get to interface with them and experience the latest technology innovations.

In the last couple of GTCs, we have seen over 40,000 people joining us. It used to be a purely physical event but people used to find it difficult to reach international locations. This time it’s a virtual event which will allow everyone to have an opportunity to participate and learn.

The developer community from India can benefit from learning about the work that is happening around the world in AI and computer graphics via GTC. For the service providers in the country, it could impart knowledge to help them move up the value chain. At the end of the day, I hope that India will have the infrastructure that gives us as a leading edge. GTC is super critical for the learnings.