Source Code for the Floating Textures algorithm presented at the Eurographics 2008 conference is now made available at Sourceforge. Floating Textures (paper and video available here) are a novel multi-view, projective texture mapping technique. While many previous multi-view texturing approaches lead to blurring and ghosting artifacts if 3D geometry and/or camera calibration are imprecise, Floating Textures warp (“float”) projected textures during run-time to preserve crisp, detailed texture appearance. The GPU implementation achieves interactive to real-time frame rates. The method is very generally applicable and can be used in combination with many image-based rendering methods or projective texturing applications. By using Floating Textures in conjunction with, e.g., visual hull rendering, light field rendering, or free-viewpoint video, improved rendering results can be obtained from fewer input images, less accurately calibrated cameras, and coarser 3D geometry proxies.

The PGI 8.0 release from The Portland Group includes a technology preview of the PGI accelerator programming strategy. PGI 8.0 compilers accept new directives that allow users to select compute intensive regions of Linux x64 Fortran and C99 programs and automatically offload them to an NVIDIA GPU. Until now HPC developers targeting GPU accelerators have had to rely on libraries or language extensions, and use of GPUs from Fortran has been extremely limited. Using the provisional support in PGI Release 8.0, programmers can accelerate Linux applications on x64+NVIDIA platforms by adding OpenMP-like compiler directives to existing high-level standard- compliant Fortran and C99 programs. At Supercomputing 2008 you can see the PGI x64+GPU compilers in action, and learn about PGI’s accelerator programming model and how you can use it to experiment with and embrace accelerated computing. You can also attend the PGI Vendor presentation by Michael Wolfe in room 19A/19B of the Austin convention center on Wednesday, November 19 from 10:30-11:00AM. Also, check out “Compilers and More: Programming GPUs Today” on HPCWire.

CUDA.NET version 2.0 is now available for download. Changes from CUDA.NET 1.1 include full support for the CUDA 2.0 API, support for double precision data types, the latest BLAS routines from CUDA 2.0, and some minor bug fixes. (CUDA.NET)

Faogen ia a Fast Ambient Occlusion Generator. It uses a GPU to accelerate computation of ambient occlusion and bent normals both as per-vertex data and in texture images. Faogen 2.0 provides updated ambient aperture and bent normal shaders customizable by editing two simple GLSL functions. Other features include improved precision on large scale models, adjustable background for AO texture images, lighting animation control and bugfixes. (Faogen)

CUDA.NET is an effort by GASS to provide access to NVIDIA CUDA functionality through .NET applications. The library currently provides .NET bindings for CUDA functions, allowing programmers to use existing .NET applications as hosts for CUDA enabled devices, this way exposing a strong co-processor that can be used with .NET. The current distribution contains a .NET library that can be used from any .NET application and language, along with examples in C# and Python showing how to use the library. The API is very straightforward and compatible with the NVIDIA CUDA API available for C applications with few modifications to ease development and align with .NET standards. See the CUDA.NET home page for more details.

In this tutorial, NVIDIA engineers and academic and industrial researchers will present CUDA and discuss its advanced use for science and engineering. The tutorial will demonstrate CUDA with traditional HPC examples including BLAS, FFT, and integration with Fortran and high-level languages (MATLAB, Mathematica, Python) and describe in detail the programming model at the heart of it all. It will then turn to advanced topics including optimizing CUDA programs, CUDA floating point performance and accuracy, and CUDA programming strategies and tips. Finally the tutorial will present detailed case studies in which domain scientists will describe their experience using CUDA to accelerate mature, deployed, real-world science codes. Scientists throughout industry and academia are already using CUDA to achieve dramatic speedups on production and research codes (see http://www.nvidia.com/cuda for a list of codes, academic papers and commercial packages based on CUDA). Presenters include Massimiliano Fatica (NVIDIA), Mark Harris (NVIDIA), Patrick LeGresley (NVIDIA), and Jim Phillips (UIUC). Follow this link to register.

The new gDEBugger V4.1 adds Geometry Shader Support and enables developers to view allocated geometry shader objects, shader source code and properties. It also allows the developer to Edit and Continue shaders on the fly. Support for the new ATI (AMD) driver performance metrics infrastructure has been added. This integration enables users to view ATI performance metrics such as hardware utilization, vertex wait for pixel, pixel wait for vertex, overdraw and more. These performance metrics together with gDEBugger’s Performance Analysis Toolbar provide a powerful solution for locating graphics system performance bottlenecks. gDEBugger, an OpenGL and OpenGL ES debugger and profiler, traces application activity on top of the OpenGL API, letting programmers see what is happening within the graphics system implementation to find bugs and optimize OpenGL application performance. gDEBugger runs on Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems. (http://www.gremedy.com)

Version 1.0 alpha of CUDPP, the CUDA Data-Parallel Algorithms Library, has been released. This version adds the segmented scan algorithm and sparse matrix-vector multiplication to CUDPP’s repertoire. Other new features include an improved “plan”-based configuration interface, an improved scan algorithm for higher performance, support for more inclusive scans and more scan operators, an improved stream compaction interface. In addition, CUDPP 1.0a adds support for CUDA 2.0 and the Windows Vista and Mac OS X (10.5.2 and higher) operating systems. CUDPP works with NVIDIA CUDA versions 1.1 and higher.

Shader Maker is a simple, cross-platform GLSL editor. It works on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. Shader Maker provides the basics of a shader editor, such that students can get started with writing their own shaders as quickly as possible. This includes: syntax highlighting in the GLSL editors; vertex, fragment, and geometry shader editors; interactive editing of uniform variables; light source parameters; pre-defined simple shapes (e.g., torus); a simple OBJ loader; and more. (Shader Maker)

The new gDEBugger V4.0 introduces gDEBugger Linux. This new exciting product adds 32-bit and 64-bit Linux Support, bringing all of gDEBugger’s debugging and profiling abilities to the Linux OpenGL developers’ world. A new Texture and Buffer Viewer has been added. This Viewer allows you to view textures, static buffers and pbuffers as images or raw data in its original format, including non-RGB data formats (float, depth, integer, luminance, etc). This version also includes significant performance improvements. gDEBugger, an OpenGL and OpenGL ES debugger and profiler, traces application activity on top of the OpenGL API to let programmers see what is happening within the graphics system implementation to find bugs and optimize OpenGL application performance. (http://www.gremedy.com)