AMD announced a GPGPU coding competition, called AMD OpenCL Coding Competition. The first phase of the competition is an open innovation challenge that requires the use of the AMD APP SDK and OpenCL. The competition is heating up with the highest registration for a TopCoder innovation challenge to date. It’s not too late to sign up and show off your ideas! If you submit your abstract before June 30th you will get feedback from AMD, otherwise you will have up until the deadline to submit your OpenCL innovation challenge submission.

Phase two of the competition will be an OpenCL algorithm optimization match that will start later in September. Read more about it in this AMD blog.

Heterogeneous computing is moving into the mainstream, and a broader range of applications are already on the way. As the provider of world-class CPUs, GPUs, and APUs, AMD offers unique insight into these technologies and how they interoperate. We’ve been working with industry and academia partners to help advance real-world use of these technologies, and to understand the opportunities that lie ahead. It’s time to share what we’ve learned so far.

With tutorials, hands-on labs, and sessions that span a range of topics from HPC to multimedia, you’ll have the opportunity to expand your view of what heterogeneous computing currently offers and where it is going. You’ll hear from industry innovators and academic pioneers who are exploring different ways of approaching problems, and utilizing new paradigms in computing to help identify solutions. You’ll meet AMD experts with deep knowledge of hardware architectures and the software techniques that best leverage those platforms. And you’ll connect with other software professionals who share your passion for the future of technology.

Learn more at developer.amd.com/afds.

From a recent announcement:

Calling all software development innovators in general purpose GPU (GPGPU), data parallel and heterogeneous computing. On June 13-16, 2011 AMD will host the AMD Fusion Developer Summit (AFDS) in Bellevue, Washington. The AFDS conference board has issued a call for presentation proposals, inviting creators of next-generation software to share research and development work through presentations based on the latest technical papers or reports.

AFDS will be a great venue for developers, academics and innovative entrepreneurs to network with others engaged in related work, collectively defining the future course of heterogeneous computing. And delivering a presentation offers you the perfect opportunity to advocate programming paradigms or gain support for industry standards.

The submission deadline is Feb. 4 2011, and the full call is available at http://amd-member.com/newsletters/DevCentral/1012.html.

From a recent press release:

GPU Systems releases Matlab language bindings for Libra SDK – heterogenous compute platform. Libra 1.2 version with runtime compiler and environment supports x86/x64 backends, OpenGL, OpenCL and CUDA compute backends. This release brings full BLAS 1,2,3 matrix/vector, dense/sparse, real/complex, single/double math library and extended functionality to Matlab computing platform executing on x86 CPUs & GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA.

Examples:

• Matlab Demo running Libra SDK WaterDroplets demo on AMD GPU (youtube video)
• Demo Source Code – matlab version
• Demo Source Code – c++ version

Version 2.2 of the ATI Stream SDK has been released. Features include:

• Support for OpenCL™ 1.1 specification.
• Support for Ubuntu® 10.04 and Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 5.5.
• Support for X86 CPUs with SSE2.x or later (Adds to existing support for X86 CPUs with SSE3.x or later).
• Support for Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Professional Edition and Minimalist GNU for Windows (MinGW) [GCC 4.4].
• Support for GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 4.1 or later on Linux® systems (Adds to existing support for GCC 4.3 or later).
• Support for single-channel OpenCL™ image format.
• Support for OpenCL™ / DirectX® 10 interoperability.
• Support for additional double-precision floating point routines in OpenCL™ C kernels.
• Support for generating and loading binary OpenCL™ kernels.
• Support for native OpenCL™ kernels.
• Preview Feature: Support for accessing additional physical memory on the GPU from OpenCL™ applications.
• Preview Feature: Support for printf() in OpenCL™ C kernels.
• Extension: Support for additional event states when registering event callbacks in OpenCL™ 1.1.
• Additional OpenCL™ samples.
• Package Update: ATI Stream Profiler 1.4.
• Various OpenCL™ compiler and runtime fixes and enhancements.
• Expanded OpenCL™ performance optimization guidelines in the ATI Stream SDK OpenCL™ Programming Guide.

The SDK and all documentation can be downloaded from http://developer.amd.com/stream.

GPU Systems has added an OpenCL back end implementation to its Libra Technology compiler and runtime architecture. Libra version 1.2 now supports x86/x64, OpenGL/OpenCL and CUDA compute back ends. The OpenCL back end generates dynamic code specifically for AMD GPUs. Also, the CUDA back end generator has been enhanced with Fermi capabilities and this new release brings full BLAS 1,2,3 matrix, vector, dense, sparse, complex, single/double standard math library functionality and access through a standard C programming interface & library. The high-level approach of the Libra API enables developers to easily extend existing high-level functionality from their favorite programming language.

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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

RenderStream has recently announced a 16-GPU version of their VDAC (Visual and Data Analysis Cluster) product. It includes up to 16 GPUs (dual-GPU boards) in a single rack-mountable chassis, along with independent power supply, host CPUs and memory. The individual cards have an exclusive x16 full-bandwidth PCIe connection. The full article is available here: http://blog.renderstream.com/?p=600

Graphic Remedy is proud to announce the release of gDEBugger Version 5.5 for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and iPhone.

This version introduces a powerful AMD GPU performance counters integration, displaying AMD graphic hardware and driver performance counters in gDEBugger’s Performance Graph and Performance Dashboard views, allowing developers to optimize their application over AMD (ATI) graphics hardware.

AMD Performance counters are available on Windows, when using ATI Radeon (TM) HD 2000 series or newer with Catalyst (TM) 9.12 or newer.

This version also includes a large number of bug fixes and stability improvements.

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