NVIDIA HAS BUNGED the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign $500,000 and named it its Cuda Center of Excellence.

The wonga is to promote the development of parallel computing facilities, Nvidia said.

The Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group at UIUC was apparently one of the first research groups to use the "parallel architecture of the GPU to accelerate research in the field of computational biophysics."

So it's not all about getting better lighting effects and frame rates in Crysis, then.

“This generous gift will be a great stimulus for Illinois' team of outstanding young programmers. Klaus Schulten, Professor of Physics predicted. "It will help to extend their ranks and equip them with the necessary tools to advance computing in decades to come.”

Cuda technology, for those of you scratching your heads at the back, is Nvidia's C-compiler and software development kit for building computing applications on graphics processing units. µ