NVIDIA Unveils CUDA

By DE Editors

NVIDIA Corp. (Santa Clara, CA) today, November 8, unveiled a newarchitecture technology for computing on NVIDIA GPUs (graphicsprocessing units) called NVIDIA CUDA. The company also announced acomplementary C-compiler development environment for the GPU that makesstreaming languages for GPU computing obsolete.

NVIDIA says that GPU computing with CUDA leverages hundreds of on-chipprocessor cores simultaneously to communicate, synchronize, share data,and solve complex computing problems. The approach, says the company,is up to 100 times faster than traditional approaches.

A CUDA-enabled GPU,says NVIDIA, operates as either a flexible threadprocessor, where thousands of computing programs called threads worktogether to solve complex problems, or as a streaming processor inspecific applications such as imaging where threads do not communicate.CUDA-enabled applications use the GPU for fine-grained data-intensiveprocessing, and the multi-core CPUs for complicated coarse-grainedtasks such as control and data management.

NVIDIA says that its C-compiler for the CUDA GPUs is an industryfirst.  The complete development environment is said to providedevelopers with a variety of tools to solve problems inherent incomputation-intensive applications such as product design, dataanalysis, technical computing, and game physics.

CUDA-enabled GPUs offer dedicated features such as a Parallel DataCache, which enables multiple 1.35GHz processor cores—up to 128 ofthem—in newest generation NVIDIA GPUs to cooperate with each other andperform computations.  Developers access these new featuresthrough a separate computing driver that communicates with DirectX andOpenGL, and the new NVIDIA C compiler for the GPU.

The CUDA Software Developers Kit (SDK) is currently available todevelopers and researchers through the NVIDIA registered developerprogram. For more details on developing with CUDA, click here.

CUDA technology is available today on the company’s GeForce 8800graphics card and is planned for future Quadro Professional Graphicsofferings. Clcik here to go to the NVIDIA website.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.