The presentation slides from the Supercomputing 2009 full-day tutorial “High-Performance Computing with CUDA” are now available at http://gpgpu.org/sc2009.

Abstract:

NVIDIA’s CUDA is a general-purpose architecture for writing highly parallel applications. CUDA provides several key abstractions—a hierarchy of thread blocks, shared memory, and barrier synchronization—for scalable high-performance parallel computing. Scientists throughout industry and academia use CUDA to achieve dramatic speedups on production and research codes. The CUDA architecture supports many languages, programming environments, and libraries including C, Fortran, OpenCL, DirectX Compute, Python, Matlab, FFT, LAPACK, etc.

In this tutorial NVIDIA engineers will partner with academic and industrial researchers to present CUDA and discuss its advanced use for science and engineering domains. The morning session will introduce CUDA programming, motivate its use with many brief examples from different HPC domains, and discuss tools and programming environments. The afternoon will discuss advanced issues such as optimization and sophisticated algorithms/data structures, closing with real-world case studies from domain scientists using CUDA for computational biophysics, fluid dynamics, seismic imaging, and theoretical physics.

HPMC is a small OpenGL/C/C++-library that extracts iso-surfaces of volumetric data directly on the GPU.

The library analyzes a lattice of scalar values describing a scalar field that is either stored in a Texture3D or can be accessed through an application-provided snippet of shader code. The output is a sequence of vertex positions and normals that form a triangulation of the iso-surface. HPMC provides traversal code to be included in an application vertex shader, which allows direct extraction in the vertex shader. Using the OpenGL transform feedback mechanism, the triangulation can be stored directly into a buffer object.

(C. Dyken, G. Ziegler, C. Theobalt, H.-P. Seidel, High-speed Marching Cubes using Histogram Pyramids, Computer Graphics Forum 27 (8), 2008.)

MTGP is a new variant of the Mersenne Twister (MT) pseudorandom number generator introduced by Mutsuo Saito and Makoto Matsumoto in 2009. MTGP is designed to take advantage of some features of GPUs, such as parallel execution and hi-speed constant reference. It supports 32-bit and 64-bit integers, as well as single and double precision floating point as output.

MTGP v1.0 is available now.

GPULib provides a library of mathematical functions that facilitate the use of high performance computing resources available on modern graphics processing units (GPUs) by engineers, scientists, analysts, and other technical professionals with minimal modification to their existing programs. This software library executes vectorized mathematical functions on graphics processing units (GPUs) from NVIDIA, bringing high-performance numerical operations to everyday desktop computers. By providing bindings for a number of Very High Level Languages (VHLLs) including MATLAB and IDL from ITT Visual Information Solutions, GPULib can accelerate new applications or be incorporated into existing applications with minimal effort. No knowledge of GPU programming and memory management is required. For more information regarding GPULib, please visit http://GPULib.txcorp.com.

The Portland Group has announced the general availability of its CUDA Fortran compiler for x64 and x86 processor-based systems running Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, including a 15-day trial license. From the press release:

Developed in collaboration with NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), the inventor of the graphics processing unit (GPU), PGI Release 2010 includes the first Fortran compiler compatible with the NVIDIA line of CUDA-enabled GPUs. A compiler is a software tool that translates applications from the high-level programming languages in which they are written by software developers into a binary form a computer can execute.

With developers taking advantage of the hundreds of cores and the relatively low cost of NVIDIA GPUs, programming to take advantage of the CUDA C compiler has become a popular means for accelerating the solution of complex computing problems. The PGI CUDA Fortran compiler is expected to accelerate GPU adoption even further in the High-Performance Computing (HPC) industry, where many important applications are written in Fortran. HPC is the field of technical computing engaged in the modeling and simulation of complex processes, such as ocean modeling, weather forecasting, environmental modeling, seismic analysis, bioinformatics and other areas.

The CUDA Fortran compiler is compatible with all NVIDIA GPUs that include Compute Capability 1.3 or higher, which includes most NVIDIA Quadro Professional Graphics solutions and all NVIDIA Tesla GPU Computing solutions. Developers are invited to download the PGI CUDA Fortran compiler from The Portland Group website at www.pgroup.com/support/downloads.php.

A 15-day trial license is available at no charge. In an effort to simplify adoption, NVIDIA has granted PGI rights to redistribute the relevant components of the CUDA Software Development Kit (SDK) as part of the PGI CUDA Fortran installation package.

The 1.0 Beta version of OpenMM has just been released.  OpenMM is a freely downloadable, high performance, extensible library that allows molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to run on high performance computer architectures, such as graphics processing units (GPUs). It currently supports NVIDIA GPUs and provides preliminary support for the new cross-platform, parallel programming standard OpenCL, which will enable it to be used on ATI GPUs.

The new release includes support for Particle Mesh Ewald and custom non-bonded interactions.  In conjunction with this release, a new version of the code needed for accelerating the GROMACS molecular dynamics software using OpenMM is also available.

OpenMM is a collaborative project between Vijay Pande’s lab at Stanford University and Simbios, the National Center for Physics-based Simulation of Biological Structures at Stanford, which is supported by the National Institutes of Health. For more information on OpenMM, visit http://simtk.org/home/openmm.

These webinars cover many topics including an introduction to C for CUDA, the OpenCL™ API, and performance optimization techniques, presented by NVIDIA DevTech Engineers with additional staff online to answer questions.

Full Schedule and short abstracts can be viewed at: http://developer.nvidia.com/object/gpu_computing_online.html

AMD’s STREAM SDK v2.0 beta4 is the first release of the STREAM SDK with OpenCL support on CPUs and GPUs. The OpenCL implementation is certified OpenCL 1.0 conformant by the Khronos group. Supported platforms are Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7, and a number of Linux distributions, all in 32 and 64-bit. The implementation supports AMD and Intel multicore CPUs, as well as the two latest GPU generations from AMD.

The STREAM SDK as well as documentation and further information is available on AMD’s developer website.

From the press release:

NVIDIA Corp. today introduced NVIDIA® Nexus, the industry’s first development environment for massively parallel computing that is integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio, the world’s most popular development environment for Windows-based solutions and Web applications and services.

“NVIDIA Nexus is going to improve programmer productivity immediately,” said Tarek El Dokor at Edge 3 Technologies. “An integrated GPU and CPU development solution is something Edge 3 has needed for a long time. The fact that it’s integrated into the Visual Studio development environment drastically reduces the learning curve.”

NVIDIA Nexus radically improves productivity by enabling developers of GPU computing applications to use the popular Microsoft Visual Studio-based tools and workflow in a transparent manner, without having to create a separate version of the application that incorporates diagnostic software calls. NVIDIA Nexus also includes the ability to run the code remotely on a different computer. Nexus includes advanced tools for simultaneously analyzing efficiency, performance, and speed of both the graphics processing unit (GPU) and central processing unit (CPU) to give developers immediate insight into how co-processing affects their applications.

Nexus is composed of three components:

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nCore Design announces the immediate availability of the NCT-300 Programming GPU Processors course. Conceived with the experienced C/C++ programmer in mind, NCT-300 covers concepts and approaches related to programming GPU processors using both CUDA and OpenCL. The course covers GPU hardware, memories, data transport, CUDA and OpenCL APIs, programming methods and performance optimization. It will enable students to understand the fundamental aspects of GPU programming and become proficient in a relatively short time. Extensive hands-on laboratories demonstrate how to apply common numerical methods using both native APIs and open source libraries. Other topics covered in the course include integrating the Intel Threading Building Blocks (TBB) abstraction layer with native GPU software APIs in addition to a GPU debugging primer.

The class brochure is available for download. To register, schedule an on-site session or contact nCore Design, go to http://www.ncoredesign.com/company/contact_us.