From an NVIDIA Press Release:

SANTA CLARA, CA—APRIL 20, 2009—NVIDIA Corporation, the inventor of the GPU, today announced the release of its OpenCL driver and software development kit (SDK) to developers participating in its OpenCL Early Access Program. NVIDIA is providing this release to solicit early feedback in advance of a beta release which will be made available to all GPU Computing Registered Developers in the coming months.

Developers can apply to become a GPU Computing Registered Developer at: www.nvidia.com/opencl

“The OpenCL standard was developed on NVIDIA GPUs and NVIDIA was the first company to demonstrate OpenCL code running on a GPU,” said Tony Tamasi, senior vice president of technology and content at NVIDIA. “Being the first to release an OpenCL driver to developers cements NVIDIA’s leadership in GPU Computing and is another key milestone in our ongoing strategy to make the GPU the soul of the modern PC.”

At the core of NVIDIA®’s GPU Computing strategy is the massively parallel CUDA™ architecture that NVIDIA pioneered and has been shipping since 2006. Accessible today through familiar industry standard programming environments such as C, Java, Fortran and Python, the CUDA architecture supports all manner of computational interfaces and, as such, is a perfect complement to OpenCL. Enabled on over 100 million NVIDIA GPUs, the CUDA architecture is enabling developers to innovate with the GPU and unleash never before seen performance across a wide range of applications.

Developers can apply to become a GPU Computing Registered Developer at: www.nvidia.com/opencl

The 2009 SPEEDUP workshop will focus on Multicore computing and Parallel Languages. Topics include, but are not limited to OpenCL, NVIDIA CUDA, the Cell processor and GPU Computing. The event will take place in Lausanne, Switzerland, on September 7 and 8, 2009. The second day features a tutorial on GPU Computing with NVIDIA CUDA, organized by Dominik Göddeke (TU Dortmund), Robert Strzodka (Max Planck Institute Informatik) and Christian Sigg (NVIDIA).

The paper deadline for the Minisymposium on GPU Computing at the 8th International Conference on Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics has been extended to April 30. The minisymposium is organized by Jose R. Herrero, Enrique S. Quintana-Orti and Robert Strzodka, and will take place September 13-16 2009, in Wroclaw, Poland.

PPAM is also happy to announce a full day tutorial on GPU Computing, organized by Robert Strzodka and Dominik Göddeke. The program and list of speakers will be available soon.

This series of free web seminars (“webinars”) starting April 15^th 2009 will cover the basics of data-parallel computing on GPUs using NVIDIA’s CUDA architecture. Tutorials will be presented by the NVIDIA Developer Technology team and will cover many topics including C for CUDA, programming with the OpenCL API , using DirectX Compute and performance optimization techniques.

Webinar topics, schedules and registration information will be updated regularly. Pre-registration is required. Please follow the links provided (after clicking “read the rest of this entry”), and registration details will be emailed back upon successful registration. Read the rest of this entry »

In this ClusterMonkey article, Andrew Humber, Senior PR Manager for Tesla and CUDA Technologies at NVIDIA Corporation, summarizes the events that made 2008 a truly exciting year for GPU Computing. (A Year in Review from the NVIDIA Tesla Team, ClusterMonkey)

The Khronos™ Group today announced the ratification and public release of the OpenCL™ 1.0 specification, the first open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors found in personal computers, servers and handheld/embedded devices. OpenCL (Open Computing Language) greatly improves speed and responsiveness for a wide spectrum of applications in numerous market categories from gaming and entertainment to scientific and medical software. Proposed six months ago as a draft specification by Apple, OpenCL has been developed and ratified by industry-leading companies including 3DLABS, Activision Blizzard, AMD, Apple, ARM, Barco, Broadcom, Codeplay, Electronic Arts, Ericsson, Freescale, HI, IBM, Intel Corporation, Imagination Technologies, Kestrel Institute, Motorola, Movidia, Nokia, NVIDIA, QNX, RapidMind, Samsung, Seaweed, TAKUMI, Texas Instruments and Umeå University. The OpenCL 1.0 specification and more details are available at http://www.khronos.org/opencl/

A launch event was held Monday night at Austin’s Rio Grande Mexican Restaurant in conjuntion with Supercomputing 2008, to celebrate the newly completed OpenCL specification.  No live demos of OpenCL applications were shown because the OpenCL spec must first be ratified by by all members of the Khronos Group before it can be publicly released.  Still, the fact that this group has completed the complex specification in less than six months is nothing less than amazing.  Macworld has posted an article discussing the event including interviews with members of the OpenCL working group.  More information about OpenCL is available at the Khronos Group Website.

Date: Monday November 17th 2008 – 5:30pm to 6:30pmLocation: Rio Grande Mexican Restaurant – right across the street from SC08

OpenCL is a royalty-free, open standard being created by the Khronos Group for programming heterogeneous parallel computing across GPUs and CPUs. OpenCL is being driven by industry-leading companies including AMD, Apple, ARM, Codeplay, Ericsson, Freescale, Imagination Technologies, IBM, Intel, Nokia, NVIDIA, Motorola, RapidMind and Texas Instruments. OpenCL enables portable programming of the emerging intersection of GPU and multi-core CPU compute capability and is designed to support a wide range of applications, from consumer software all the way to HPC solutions, through a low-level, high-performance, device-independent abstraction. This informal gathering will provide one of the first opportunities for the HPC community to gain an insight into the architecture and direction of this exciting development. Tex-Mex appetizers and cold beer will be provided! Please register early as seating is limited – we look forward to seeing you in Austin!

(OpenCL Briefing Registration at khronos.org)