Figuring out the best way to transform a frozen pizza into a perfectly warmed pie, gooey on top and crispy on the bottom, is as much a computer problem as a work of culinary art.
General Mills, maker of the Totino’s and Jeno’s brands of pizzas, would prefer not to whip up a thousand combinations of mozzarella cheese, tomato paste, crust and chemicals and blast them with microwave radiation. It’s a lot cheaper and easier to model different pizzas using a sophisticated computer and only cook up the best candidates.
To speed up the task, General Mills turned to computers containing high-powered graphics chips from Nvidia, a Santa Clara, Calif., company best known for making video games look more realistic on game consoles and personal computers.
