Dining on Data

Processing, in real-time, the enormous data stream that's flowing through AVs is increasingly the job of NVIDIA's mighty GPUs. Danny Shapiro relishes the feast.

Every year, NVIDIA hosts its GPU Technology Conference (GTC), a multi-day news conference/expo to highlight the advances the tech company has made in the past 12 months. In 2018, the big automotive news at GTC was the introduction of DRIVE Constellation, a simulation system designed to “train” the artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms used for autonomous driving.

One year and countless line of code updates later, NVIDIA announced at GTC 2019 that the Toyota Research Institute-Advanced Development (TRI-AD) would be the first publicly named customer for DRIVE Constellation. Danny Shapiro, NVIDIA's senior director of automotive, could have used the moment as an excuse to celebrate. Instead, he was all business as he sat down with SAE's Autonomous Vehicle Engineering and contemplated the work still to do.