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Thursday, October 3, 2024

All's Well That's Blackwell; Blackwell: America's First Nurse, An American Mathematician, And Now A Nvidia GPU -- October 2, 2024

Locator: 48467BLACKWELL.

Nvidia overnight:

Nvidia's Blackwell GPU.

Blackwell is a graphics processing unit (GPU) microarchitecture developed by Nvidia as the successor to the Hopper and Ada Lovelace microarchitectures. Named after statistician and mathematician David Blackwell, the name of the Blackwell architecture was leaked in 2022 with the B40 and B100 accelerators being confirmed in October 2023 with an official Nvidia roadmap shown during an investors presentation. It was officially announced at Nvidia's GTC 2024 keynote on March 18, 2024.

But another bit of trivia, completely unrelated but interesting none the same. There was another "famous" American with the Blackwell surname: 

Elizabeth Blackwell (1810 - 1921) was the first American woman to have become a physician; she visited Paris in 1840, to study medicine there, as many great physicians did at that time. Bio here.

While teaching in Cincinnati, Blackwell boarded with the families of two southern physicians who mentored her. In 1847, she returned to Philadelphia, hoping that Quaker friends could assist her entrance into medical school. 

Rejected everywhere she applied, she was ultimately admitted to Geneva College in rural New York, however, her acceptance letter was intended as a practical joke

She graduated in 1849, first in her class, and ultimately started a small clinic in NYC in 1851. 

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