From the press release:

SANTA CLARA, CA & URBANA, IL—JUNE 30, 2008—NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), the worldwide leader in visual computing technologies, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) today announced that UIUC has been named as the world’s first CUDA Center of Excellence. In addition to the appointment, NVIDIA has donated $500,000 to UIUC for the development of parallel computing facilities and the continuation of its research programs.

“The CUDA Center of Excellence program rewards schools that truly embrace the concept of parallel processing as the future of computing,” said Dr. David Kirk, chief scientist at NVIDIA. “Schools receiving this accreditation integrate the CUDA software environment into their curriculum to help their students harness the capabilities of these new parallel processing architectures. As one of the country’s leading schools in this field, I am personally delighted to appoint UIUC as our first CUDA Center of Excellence.”

The Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group at UIUC was one of the first research groups to leverage the parallel architecture of the GPU to accelerate their research in the field of computational biophysics. They have successfully accelerated NAMD/VMD – a popular parallel molecular dynamics application that analyzes large biomolecular systems. It is hoped that this donation will aid this group, and others at the university, to further their work and speed them down the path to great discovery.

(Complete Press Release)

The GPGPU group at AT&T Labs - Research conducts research on GPU applications in the areas of computational geometry, data visualization and data analysis. (AT&T Labs GPGPU Home Page)

The GAMMA research group at UNC Chapel Hill (led by Profs. Dinesh Manocha and Ming Lin) uses GPUs for Voronoi computations, collision detection, penetration computation and collision response, motion planning, and more.