GPUCV is a free GPU-accelerated library for image processing and computer vision. It offers an Intel OPENCV-like programming interface for easily porting existing applications. A one-page description is available. A longer presentation and discussion was published at IEEE ICME 2006. (J.-P. Farrugia, P. Horain, E. Guehenneux, Y. Allusse, “GPUCV: A framework for image processing acceleration with graphics processors”, CDROM proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo, July 9-12, 2006, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.)

A beta of NVIDIA’s CUDA development environment, NVIDIA’s new technology for computing with GPUs, is now posted on developer.nvidia.com. This beta release of CUDA contains a C compiler for the GPU and an SDK with examples to get you started coding for the GPU. From the press release:

GPU Computing with CUDA is a new approach to computing where hundreds of on-chip processors simultaneously communicate and cooperate to solve complex computing problems. Applications that require mathematically intensive computing on large amounts of data are ideal targets for GPU Computing. NVIDIA NVIDIA’s CUDA technology is available in GeForce 8800 graphics products and future NVIDIA Quadro Professional Graphics solutions based on 8-series (G8X) GPUs. Developers are invited to download the beta version of the CUDA Software Developers Kit (SDK) and C compiler for Windows XP and Linux (RedHat Release 4 Update 3) from the NVIDIA Developer Web site at developer.nvidia.com/cuda. GPU Computing Forums for news, discussion and programming tips are also available at forums.nvidia.com.

Aaron Lefohn announces the release of version 1.5 of his OpenGL FBO Class. This release includes the following changes:

1. Updated enumerations in error checking to match current FBO specification.
   Fixes compilation errors with current drivers.
2. Small API change to AttachTexture to better support attaching multiple
   textures with a single entry point.
3. Added FBO Manager for managing a pool of FBOs based on width, height, and
   format. Manager is configurable to use user-defined management policies/keys.

(Available on sourceforge.)

NVIDIA Corporation today unveiled NVIDIA CUDA technology, a new architecture for computing on NVIDIA GPUs, and the industry’s first C-compiler development environment for the GPU. From the NVIDIA Press Release:

GPU computing with CUDA is a new approach to computing where hundreds of on-chip processor cores simultaneously communicate and cooperate to solve complex computing problems up to 100 times faster than traditional approaches. This breakthrough architecture is complemented by another first: the NVIDIA C-compiler for the GPU. This complete development environment gives developers the tools they need to solve new problems in computation-intensive applications such as product design, data analysis, technical computing, and game physics. CUDA-enabled GPUs offer dedicated features for computing, including the Parallel Data Cache, which allows 128, 1.35 GHz processor cores in newest generation NVIDIA GPUs to cooperate with each other while performing intricate computations. Developers access these new features through a separate computing driver that communicates with DirectX and OpenGL, and the new NVIDIA C compiler for the GPU, which obsoletes streaming languages for GPU computing.

CUDA website: http://www.nvidia.com/cuda

PeakStream, Inc., a leading software application platform provider for the high performance computing (HPC) market, today unveiled the PeakStream Platform. Available immediately, the PeakStream Platform makes it possible to easily program new high performance processors such as multi-core CPUs, graphics processing units (GPUs) and Cell processors, converting them into radically powerful computing engines for exponentially increased application performance and decreased time-to-solution at reduced cost. The company also announced the completion of equity financing totaling $17 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sequoia Capital and Foundation Capital. (www.peakstreaminc.com)

At SIGGRAPH in Boston, Derek Gerstmann of ATI presented a sketch titled, “A Performance-Oriented Data Parallel Virtual Machine for GPGPU Applications.” The system exposes GPU functionality at a low-level (including the fragment processors’ native instruction set), giving the programmer direct control over program compilation and loading, GPU memory management, and GPU/CPU synchronization. A write-up is available at www.ati.com/developer. If you are interested in obtaining the system for evaluation, please contact researcher@ati.com.

The Accelerator GPGPU programming system from Microsoft Research is now available for download. The system was mentioned previously here on gpgpu.org. A key purpose in releasing the software is to get feedback from the gpgpu community about the programming model and the API. Microsoft Research are also interested in building higher level libraries using the system.
(http://research.microsoft.com/downloads. Also see the Accelerator Project Wiki.)

This paper describes Accelerator, a system that simplifies the programming of GPUs for general-purpose uses. Accelerator provides a high-level data-parallel programming model as a library that is available from a conventional imperative programming language (C#). The library translates the data-parallel operations on-the-fly to optimized GPU pixel shader code and API calls. The authors describe the compilation techniques used to produce optimized pixel shader code, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach by providing results for a set of compute-intensive benchmarks drawn from image processing and computer vision. The speeds of the Accelerator versions of the benchmarks are typically within 50% of the speeds of hand-written pixel shader code. Some benchmarks significantly outperform C versions running on a CPU by up to 18x. (Accelerator: simplified programming of graphics processing units for general-purpose uses via data-parallelism. David Tarditi, Sidd Puri, Jose Oglesby. Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2005-184. December 2005.)

Sh Version 0.8.0rc0, the first release candidate for the upcoming Sh 0.8, is now available. There are plenty of  new features and bug fixes, but most importantly this release has an API that completely matches the book Metaprogramming GPUs with Sh, which the 0.8.x series of releases will stick to. (http://libsh.org)

The latest versions of Cycling ’74s MAX/MSP/Jitter software packages provide a visual programming environment for new media with applications in GPU based stream processing, real-time video processing, volume visualization, and generic n-dimensional data analysis and signal processing. Jitter supports cascaded GLSL/Cg/ARB/NV shader programs with a streamlined render-to-texture interface, allowing fast prototyping of complex shader effects to be processed in a generic data flow network. (Jitter v1.5 Upgrade Info. Cycling ’74.)