The GAP (Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain) and HPCA (Universidad Jaume I, Spain) research groups are proud to announce the public release of rCUDA 1.0. The rCUDA Framework enables the concurrent usage of CUDA-compatible devices remotely by employing the sockets API for communication between clients and servers. Thus, it can be useful in three different environments:

• Clusters. To reduce the number of GPUs installed in High Performance Clusters. This leads to energy savings, as well as other related savings like acquisition costs, maintenance, space, cooling, etc.
• Academia. In low performance networks, to offer access to a few high performance GPUs concurrently to all the students.
• Virtual Machines. To enable the access to the CUDA facilities on the physical machine.

The current version of rCUDA (v1.0) implements all functions in the CUDA Runtime API version 2.3, excluding OpenGL and Direct3D interoperability. rCUDA 1.0 targets the Linux OS (for 32- and 64-bit architectures) on both client and server sides. The framework is free for any purpose under the terms and conditions of the GNU GPL/LGPL (where applicable) licenses.

For additional information, visit the rCUDA web page or Antonio Peña’s webpage.

Version 1.2 of Thrust, an open-source template library for developing CUDA applications, has been released. Modeled after the C++ Standard Template Library (STL), Thrust brings a familiar abstraction layer to the realm of GPU computing. This version adds several new features, including:

• support for multicore CPUs via OpenMP
• support for CUDA 3.0 and new GPUs based on the Fermi architecture
• support for the Ocelot virtual machine
• pseudo random number generation
• key-value reduction
• set intersection
• and many more

The Thrust web page provides a quick-start guide, online documentation, many examples and introductory slides. Thrust is open-source software distributed under the OSI-approved Apache License v2.0.

Abstract:

As growing power dissipation and thermal effects disrupted the rising clock frequency trend and threatened to annul Moore’s law, the computing industry has switched its route to higher performance through parallel processing. The rise of multi-core systems in all domains of computing has opened the door to heterogeneous multi-processors, where processors of different compute characteristics can be combined to effectively boost the performance per watt of different application kernels. GPUs and FPGAs are becoming very popular in PC-based heterogeneous systems for speeding up compute intensive kernels of scientific, imaging and simulation applications. GPUs can execute hundreds of concurrent threads, while FPGAs provide customized concurrency for highly parallel kernels. However, exploiting the parallelism available in these applications is currently not a push-button task. Often the programmer has to expose the application’s fine and coarse grained parallelism by using special APIs. CUDA is such a parallel-computing API that is driven by the GPU industry and is gaining significant popularity. In this work, we adapt the CUDA programming model into a new FPGA design flow called FCUDA, which efficiently maps the coarse and fine grained parallelism exposed in CUDA onto the reconfigurable fabric. Our CUDA-to-FPGA flow employs AutoPilot, an advanced high-level synthesis tool which enables high-abstraction FPGA programming. FCUDA is based on a source-to-source compilation that transforms the SPMD CUDA thread blocks into parallel C code for AutoPilot. We describe the details of our CUDA-to-FPGA flow and demonstrate the highly competitive performance of the resulting customized FPGA multi-core accelerators. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first CUDA-to-FPGA flow to demonstrate the applicability and potential advantage of using the CUDA programming model for high-performance computing in FPGAs.

(Alexandros Papakonstantinou, Karthik Gururaj, John A. Stratton, Deming Chen, Jason Cong and Wen-Mei W. Hwu, FCUDA: Enabling efficient compilation of CUDA kernels onto FPGAs, Proceedings of the 7th Symposium on Application Specific Processors, pp.35-42, July 2009. DOI: 10.1109/SASP.2009.5226333)

From the press release:

NVIDIA Corp. today introduced NVIDIA® Nexus, the industry’s first development environment for massively parallel computing that is integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio, the world’s most popular development environment for Windows-based solutions and Web applications and services.

“NVIDIA Nexus is going to improve programmer productivity immediately,” said Tarek El Dokor at Edge 3 Technologies. “An integrated GPU and CPU development solution is something Edge 3 has needed for a long time. The fact that it’s integrated into the Visual Studio development environment drastically reduces the learning curve.”

NVIDIA Nexus radically improves productivity by enabling developers of GPU computing applications to use the popular Microsoft Visual Studio-based tools and workflow in a transparent manner, without having to create a separate version of the application that incorporates diagnostic software calls. NVIDIA Nexus also includes the ability to run the code remotely on a different computer. Nexus includes advanced tools for simultaneously analyzing efficiency, performance, and speed of both the graphics processing unit (GPU) and central processing unit (CPU) to give developers immediate insight into how co-processing affects their applications.

Nexus is composed of three components:

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This article at HPC Wire by Matthew Papakipos, CTO of PeakStream Technologies, discusses the convergence of CPU and GPU architectures, the programming challenges architecture changes pose, and possible solutions to these challenges.