A new GPU and high-performance computing meetup group has been formed in Pune, India.   The informal special interest group will bring together GPU users from all fields and experience levels in India, including academicians, researchers, scientists, device manufacturers, system integrators, service providers and all early adopters of HPC & GPU computing. The group, hosted on Meetup.com, will provide HPC and GPU computing enthusiasts in India a comprehensive platform to track industry trends and engage with each other, discussing the latest developments in the field.

The group will have a core group of key academicians to lead and moderate discussions. The site will feature a bank of research papers, case studies and posts on the latest GPU-related technological developments. The meetup group will also encourage users to engage and interact over group chats and web conferences.  You can find the group at

http://www.meetup.com/HPC-and-GPU-Computing-Group-India

Today NVIDIA released CUDA 4.1, including a new CUDA Toolkit, SDK, Visual Profiler, Parallel Nsight IDE and NVIDIA device driver.

CUDA 4.1 makes it easier to accelerate scientific research with GPUs with key features including

• a redesigned Visual Profiler with automated performance analysis and expert guidance;
• a new LLVM-based compiler that generates up to 10% faster code; and
• 1000+ new imaging and signal processing functions in the NPP library.

The CuSparse library included with CUDA 4.1 has a new tridiagonal solver and 2x faster sparse matrix-vector multiplication using the ELL hybrid format, and the CuRand library included with CUDA 4.1 has two new random number generators. Read the rest of this entry »

CLCC, the light-weight and flexible utility for integrating OpenCL source builds into your project has just been updated to version 0.3.0. This version allows developers to save compiled binaries as object files for distribution with their programs and adds a series of options to select specific target platform/device combinations. Documentation and further information is available at http://clcc.sourceforge.net.

The SpeedIt team recently compared and benchmarked the SpMV performance of CUSPARSE 4.0, CUSP 0.2.0 and SpeedIT 2.0 on 23 randomly chosen matrices from University Florida Matrix Collection. Comparisons were done on a Tesla C2050 in single and double precision. The full report is available at http://wp.me/p1ZihD-1.

Partnering with NVIDIA and Microsoft, this four day course is designed for Programmers who are looking to develop comprehensive skills in writing and optimizing applications that fully leverage the multi-core processing capabilities of the GPU.

Delivered by Acceleware’s Developers, who provide real world experience and examples, the training comprises classroom lectures and hands-on tutorials. Each student will be supplied with a laptop equipped with NVIDIA GPUs for the duration of the course. Small class sizes maximize learning and ensure a personal educational experience.

Register before January 13 and receive $250 off your course fee!
Enter promotional code AXTEB2012

Version 1.2.0 of the OpenCL-based C++ linear algebra library ViennaCL is now available for download! It features a high-level interface compatible with Boost.ublas, which allows for compact code and high productivity. Highlights of the new release are the following features (all experimental):

• Several algebraic multigrid preconditioners
• Sparse approximate inverse preconditioners
• Fast Fourier transform
• Structured dense matrices (circulant, Hankel, Toeplitz, Vandermonde)
• Reordering algorithms (Cuthill-McKee, Gibbs-Poole-Stockmeyer)
• Proxies for manipulating subvectors and submatrices

The features are expected to reach maturity in the 1.2.x branch. More information about the library including download links is available at http://viennacl.sourceforge.net.

FortranCL is an interface to OpenCL from Fortran90 programs, and it is distributed under the LGPL free software license. It allows Fortran programmer to directly execute code on GPUs or other massively parallel processors. The interface is designed to be as close to the C OpenCL interface as possible, and it is written in native Fortran 90 with type checking. FortranCL is not complete yet, but it includes enough subroutines to write GPU accelerated code in Fortran. More information: http://code.google.com/p/fortrancl/

HOOMD-blue performs general-purpose particle dynamics simulations on a single workstation, taking advantage of NVIDIA GPUs to attain a level of performance equivalent to many cores on a fast cluster. Flexible and configurable, HOOMD-blue is currently being used for coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations of nano-materials, glasses, and surfactants, dissipative particle dynamics simulations (DPD) of polymers, and crystallization of metals.

HOOMD-blue 0.10.0 adds many new features. Highlights include: Read the rest of this entry »

A major new release of the Intel SPMD Program Compiler (ispc) was posted on December 5, 2011. ispc is an extended version of the C programming language with support for “single program, multiple data” (SPMD) programming on the CPU; the SPMD model makes it easy to harness the full power of both the SIMD vector units and multiple cores on modern CPUs. The major features added in the 1.1 release include:

• Full support for pointers, including pointer arithmetic, function pointers, and all other features of pointers in C.
• A new parallel “foreach” statement, for more easily mapping computation to data.
• Substantially revised documentation, including a new Performance Guide.
• Many other small bug fixes and improvements.

ispc is open-source and is licensed under the BSD license. Source and binaries are available from http://ispc.github.com.

The NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit 4.1 RC2 is now available for anyone to download. The key features of this release are:

• A new LLVM based compiler
• Over 1000 additional image processing function in the NPP library
• A Visual profiler

There is also a new version of Parallel Nsight 2.1 RC2 with support for CUDA 4.1. To download and to find out more follow: http://bit.ly/sRpQvr