Business Spotlight: Carson City company at forefront of driverless innovation
A Carson City computer technology company known for making high resolution applications is now a key partner in the development of autonomous public transit systems currently being tested for the San Francisco Bay Area market.
Cubix Corporation, in business since 1975 and located in the Nevada state capital for the past 38 years, is producing components that make driverless technology possible.
Eric Fiegehen, the company's director of visualization and high performance compute (HPC) solutions, said a partnership with NVIDIA Corporation of Santa Clara, California, has led to technology that gives autonomous capabilities to people-moving mass transit buses.
Cubix builds high-performance [input/output] card expansion units, he said, part of the company's Xpander product line. They are purposely built for use with multiple NVIDIA graphics processing unit (GPU) cards.
"In essence, Cubix Xpanders plus NVIDIA GPUs help turn ordinary PCs into supercomputers," Fiegehen said.
The world of computerized graphics applications changed with the develop of the GPU, which has now exponentially enhanced a computer's capabilities by expanding the doors of artificial intelligence.
To the designers and producers of autonomous technology computers, this latest innovation represents yet new milestones in the computer and digital ages.
"Internally, we call this technology 'machine learning,' or 'deep learning' technology," Fiegehen said. "Using NVIDIA GPUs, it's now possible for computers to actually learn, or even teach themselves, how to perform functions which only humans were able to until a few years ago."
Driverless technology, he said, is today's most well-known example of deep learning application.
Fiegehen said Cubix partnered locally with the University of Nevada, Reno, to research, design, develop and produce the expansion card products essential for autonomous vehicle operation.
The private-public partnership forged in Northern Nevada has been key to the product line's success, he said, not just because of resources but also the talent involved in creating technology.
Cubix is able to recruit skilled engineers from a local talent pool, too.
"For Cubix, being a high tech company located hundreds of miles from Silicon Valley, partnering with UNR is very important as a local source for software programing and engineering talent," he said.
But despite the proximity of this talent and research in nearby Reno, the success of autonomous vehicle technology and its components -- like the GPU expansion card units built by Cubix -- has not happened overnight.
Fiegehen said ground work laid to create marketable deep learning applications has taken more than decade of research and development.
"As both CPUs and GPUs have made performance leaps with every new generation of product (every 12-18 months), the ability of computers to learn and process information faster and faster has now brought autonomous driving technology to the point where the computers and machines are as good, if not better, than human drivers," he said. "Over the next several years, you're going to see this technology gradually affect consumer purchasing decisions with automobiles and other vehicles."
Cubix has become well known over the years for its high performance compute (HPC) applications and card expansion units that have enhanced visual products in the media and entertainment industry.
About one-fifth of recorded media content seen by television and movie viewers today is improved by Cubix products, Fiegehen said, which accelerates certain features of high-end finishing or color-grade applications used in the TV, advertisement, movies, and even online content.
For more information about Cubix Corporation and the innovations occurring there, visit the company's web site here.
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