At the ISC 2010 conference in Hamburg, Germany, this week, NVIDIA announced new programs for the growing CUDA/GPGPU developer community:

• CUDA Certification Program – Driven by demand for qualified GPGPU engineers, this is the first program to certify expertise in massively parallel programming on GPUs.
• CUDA Research Centers – Recognizes institutions that embrace GPU Computing across multiple research fields.
• CUDA Teaching Centers – Recognizes institutions that have integrated GPU Computing techniques into their mainstream computer programming curriculum.

These programs complement the existing CUDA Center of Excellence program, which has recognized 10 premier institutions around the world. More details are available here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/io_1275409333119.html

AMD is offering an introductory tutorial to OpenCL™ that will be held alongside the 2010 Symposium on Application Accelerators in High Performance Computing (SAAHPC’10). The tutorial is a “programmer’s introduction” which covers the ideas behind OpenCL™ and their translation to source code. Read the rest of this entry »

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) recently released ATI Stream Profiler version 1.3. ATI Stream Profiler is a Microsoft® Visual Studio® integrated runtime profiler that gathers performance data from the GPU as your OpenCL™ application runs. This information can then be used by developers to discover where the bottlenecks are in their OpenCL™ application and find ways to optimize their application’s performance.

Features of the tool include:

• Measure the execution time of an OpenCL kernel
• Query the hardware performance counters on ATI Radeon graphics cards
• Display the memory traffic from and to GPU
• Compare multiple runs (sessions) of the same or different programs
• Store the profile data for each run in a csv file
• Display the IL and ISA (hardware disassembly) code of the OpenCL kernel

HOOMD-blue stands for Highly Optimized Object-oriented Many-particle Dynamics — Blue Edition. It performs general-purpose particle dynamics simulations on a single workstation, taking advantage of  NVIDIA GPUs to attain a level of performance equivalent to dozens of processor cores on a fast cluster.

HOOMD-blue 0.9.0 is a major new release. Highlights include:

• Support for Fermi generation GPUs
• Performance enhancements
• New pair potentials
• Particle data is now accessible from hoomd scripts
• Binary format dump files for simulation restarts
• Numerous small enhancements to enable easily restartable jobs
• 2D simulations are now possible
• Integration methods can now be applied to specified groups of particles
• All IMD commands issued by VMD are now understood
• … and more

HOOMD-blue 0.9.0 is available for download under an open source license.

The Scalable Heterogeneous Computing Benchmark Suite (SHOC) is a collection of benchmark programs testing the performance and stability of systems using computing devices with non-traditional architectures for general-purpose computing, and the software used to program them. Its initial focus is on systems containing Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and multi-core processors, and on the OpenCL programming standard. It can be used on clusters as well as individual hosts.

(Danalis, A., Marin, G., McCurdy, C., Meredith, J., Roth, P., Spafford, K., Tipparaju, V., Vetter, J. (2010). The Scalable HeterOgeneous Computing (SHOC) Benchmark Suite.Proceedings of the Third Workshop on General-Purpose Computation on Graphics Processors (GPGPU 2010). PDF. Mar 2010.)

The CUDA Data Parallel Primitives Library (CUDPP) is a cross-platform, open-source library of data-parallel algorithm primitives such as parallel prefix-sum (“scan”), parallel sort and parallel reduction. Primitives such as these are important building blocks for a wide variety of data-parallel algorithms, including sorting, stream compaction, and building data structures such as trees and summed-area tables. CUDPP runs on processors that support CUDA.

CUDPP release 1.1.1 is a bugfix release with fixes for scan, segmented scan, stream compaction, and radix sort on the NVIDIA Fermi (sm_20) architecture, including GeForce 400 series and Tesla 20 series GPUs.  It also includes improvements and bugfixes for radix sorts on 64-bit OSes, and fixes for 64-bit builds on MS Windows OSes and Apple OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).  Change Log.

Barcelona Computing Week
BSC/UPC, Barcelona, Spain
July 5-9, 2010
http://bcw.ac.upc.edu

The Programming and Tuning Massively Parallel Systems Summer School (PUMPS) is aimed at enriching the skills of researchers, graduate students and teachers with cutting-edge techniques and hands-on experience in developing applications for many-core processors with massively parallel computing resources like GPU accelerators.

Instructors:

• Wen-mei Hwu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• David Kirk, NVIDIA Fellow, former Chief Scientist, NVIDIA Corporation

Co-Directors:

• Mateo Valero (BSC/UPC)
• Wen-mei Hwu (UIUC)

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GeoSpin has released the first version of CLyther for beta testing. Please visit the CLyther SourceForge website for more information.  CLyther enables developers to seamlessly write GPGPU code completely in python with no additional syntax. CLyther’s core driver contains a python compiler to convert Python functions and types to OpenCL during runtime.

CLyther currently only supports a subset of the Python language definition but adds many new features to OpenCL such as:

• OpenCL interface similar to PyOpenCL
• Dynamic compilation of OpenCL code at runtime
• Fast prototyping of OpenCL code
• Create OpenCL code using the Python language definition
• Passing functions as arguments to OpenCL kernels
• Pure Python emulation mode of kernel functions

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From the open call for authors:

After the tremendous success of the first seven entries to the ShaderX book series, and the upcoming success of the GPU Pro book, we are looking for authors for GPU Pro 2. The upcoming book will cover advanced rendering techniques that run on the DirectX and/or OpenGL run-time or any other run-time with any language available. It will include topics on: Geometry Manipulation; Rendering Techniques; Handheld Devices Programming; Effects in Image Space; Shadows; 3D Engine Design; Graphics Related Tools; Environmental Effects and a dedicated section on mathematics used in graphics programming.

Proposals are due by May 17th, 2010. Please send them to wolf at shaderx.com. An example proposal, writing guidelines and a FAQ can be downloaded from http://gpupro2.blogspot.com/.

Geist Software Labs has released the first version of OpenCL Studio for beta testing. OpenCL Studio combines OpenCL and OpenGL into a single integrated development environment that allows you to visualize OpenCL computation using powerful 3D rendering techniques. The editor hides much of the complexity of the underlying APIs while still providing flexibility via the Lua scripting language. Integrated source code editors and debugging capabilities for OpenCL, GLSL, and Lua, as well as a toolbox of 2D user interface widgets provide a framework for a wide range of parallel programming solutions.