The new High-Performance Graphics Conference is the synthesis of two highly-successful conference series:

• Graphics Hardware, an annual conference focusing on graphics hardware, architecture, and systems since 1986, and
• Interactive Ray Tracing, an innovative conference series focusing on the emerging field of interactive ray tracing since 2006.

By combining these two conferences, High-Performance Graphics aims to bring to authors and attendees the best of both, while extending the scope of the new conference to cover the overarching field of performance-oriented graphics systems covering innovative algorithms, efficient implementations, and hardware architecture. This broader focus offers a common forum bringing together researchers, engineers, and architects to discuss the complex interactions of massively parallel hardware, novel programming models, efficient graphics algorithms, and innovative applications.

Paper submissions are due April 30th.  For more information see the High-Performance Graphics Website.

Alexander Heusel of the University of Frankfurt has released open source Java bindings for CUDA.  The current project state is alpha, with support for the CUDA driver API, and support for the CUBLAS and CUFFT libraries is pending.  Contributions are welcome. For more information see the project website: http://jacuzzi.sourceforge.net

To be held March 30-31, 2009 in Berkeley, California, HotPar ’09 will bring together researchers and practitioners doing innovative work in the area of parallel computing. HotPar recognizes the broad impact of multicore computing and seeks relevant contributions from all fields, including application design, languages and compilers, systems, and architecture.  (http://www.usenix.org/events/hotpar09/)

The new gDEBugger V4.5 adds the ability to view texture MIP-map levels. Each texture MIP-map level’s parameters and data (as an image or raw data) can be displayed in the gDEBugger Texture and Buffers viewer. Browse the different MIP-map levels using the Texture MIP-map Level slidergDEBugger V4.5 also introduces support for 1D and 2D texture arrays. The new Textures and Buffers viewer Texture Layer slider enables viewing the contents of different texture layers. This version also introduces notable performance and stability improvements.

gDEBugger, an OpenGL and OpenGL ES debugger and profiler, traces application activity on top of the OpenGL API and lets programmers see what is happening within the graphics system implementation to find bugs and optimize OpenGL application performance. gDEBugger runs on Windows and Linux operating systems, and is currently in Beta phase on Mac OS X.

http://www.gremedy.com

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). Significant performance speedups of 100 times were achieved in some cases by running OpenMM on GPUs in desktop PCs (vs CPU). The new release includes a version of the widely used MD package GROMACS that integrates the OpenMM library, enabling acceleration on high-end NVIDIA and AMD/ATI GPUs. 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, go to http://simtk.org/home/openmm. (Full press release.)

CUDA.NET 2.1 has been released with support for the NVIDIA CUDA 2.1 API. This version supports DirectX 10 interoperability and the new JIT compilation API. The library is supported on Windows and Linux operating systems. (CUDA.NET)

The first NTU workshop on GPU supercomputing was held at NTU on January 16, 2009. Organized by the Center for Quantum Science and Engineering (CQSE) at National Taiwan University, This workshop consisted of seminars on applications of GPU/CUDA in high performance computations in science and engineering, as well as other fields. Slides from the presentations are now online.

Scott Sherman from Bjorn3D is holding a “Fold for Stephanie” month in support of his 13-year-old daughter who has Hodgkins stage 4B cancer. He is even giving away an XFX NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 GPU to the highest folder for Stephanie. For more information, see the Bjorn 3D Forums.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is launching a 13-week seminar series that will focus on emerging applications for parallel computing. The Need for Speed Seminar Series will feature world-class applications experts and researchers who will discuss what increased computing performance means for their fields. The series will bring together hardware engineers and software developers who require parallel processing to create faster and superior applications. Speakers will help forecast breakthroughs enabled by the rapid advances in computing performance per dollar, performance per watt, or storage capacity provided by Moore’s Law.

David Kirk, NVIDIA Fellow, will kick off the series with a special keynote on January 28. Following that, the Need for Speed series will be held at 4pm CT every Wednesday until April 29 at the UI’s Coordinated Science Laboratory. Seminars will also stream live over the internet and speakers will take questions from both in-house and online audience members. To learn more about the series, or to view the live seminars, please visit the Need for Speed seminar web page.

(Editor’s Note: this news was submitted after the talk occurred.)

February 5, 2009, 11am PST / 2pm EST

Are you looking for ways to improve your productivity by accelerating MATLAB functions? Now you can with the unprecedented performance of GPU computing.

By attending this webinar, you will learn:

• What is GPU computing
• What is NVIDIA CUDA parallel computing architecture
• What is the Jacket engine for MATLAB from AccelerEyes
• How to get 10x to 50x speed-up for several MATLAB functions

Date: Thursday, February 5, 2009
Time: 11:00am PST / 2:00pm EST
Duration: 45 Minute Presentation, 15 Minute Q&A
Register Here
Presented By: Sumit Gupta, Ph.D., Sr Product Manager of Tesla GPU Computing at NVIDIA and John Melonakos, Ph.D., CEO at AccelerEyes LLC