This article by Jeff Layton at ClusterMonkey summarizes the history of GPU Computing in terms of high-level programming languages and abstractions, from the early days of GPGPU programming using graphics APIs, to Stream, CUDA and OpenCL. The second half of the article provides an introduction to the PGI 8.0 Technology Preview, which allows the use of pragmas to automatically parallelize and run compute-intensive kernels in standard C and Fortran code on accelerators like GPUs. (GPU Programming For the Rest Of Us, Jeff Layton, ClusterMonkey.net)

Graphic Remedy is proud to announce the upcoming release of gDEBugger for Mac OS X. This new product brings all of gDEBugger’s Debugging and Profiling abilities to the Mac OpenGL developer’s world. Using gDEBugger Mac will help OS X OpenGL developers optimize their application performance: find graphics pipeline bottlenecks, improve application graphics memory consumption, locate and remove redundant OpenGL calls and graphics memory leaks, and much more. Visit the gDebuggerMac home page to join the Beta Program, see screenshots and get more details.

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, Linux and Mac OS X operating systems.

The PGI 8.0 release from The Portland Group includes a technology preview of the PGI accelerator programming strategy. PGI 8.0 compilers accept new directives that allow users to select compute intensive regions of Linux x64 Fortran and C99 programs and automatically offload them to an NVIDIA GPU. Until now HPC developers targeting GPU accelerators have had to rely on libraries or language extensions, and use of GPUs from Fortran has been extremely limited. Using the provisional support in PGI Release 8.0, programmers can accelerate Linux applications on x64+NVIDIA platforms by adding OpenMP-like compiler directives to existing high-level standard- compliant Fortran and C99 programs. At Supercomputing 2008 you can see the PGI x64+GPU compilers in action, and learn about PGI’s accelerator programming model and how you can use it to experiment with and embrace accelerated computing. You can also attend the PGI Vendor presentation by Michael Wolfe in room 19A/19B of the Austin convention center on Wednesday, November 19 from 10:30-11:00AM. Also, check out “Compilers and More: Programming GPUs Today” on HPCWire.

Faogen ia a Fast Ambient Occlusion Generator. It uses a GPU to accelerate computation of ambient occlusion and bent normals both as per-vertex data and in texture images. Faogen 2.0 provides updated ambient aperture and bent normal shaders customizable by editing two simple GLSL functions. Other features include improved precision on large scale models, adjustable background for AO texture images, lighting animation control and bugfixes. (Faogen)

The new gDEBugger V4.1 adds Geometry Shader Support and enables developers to view allocated geometry shader objects, shader source code and properties. It also allows the developer to Edit and Continue shaders on the fly. Support for the new ATI (AMD) driver performance metrics infrastructure has been added. This integration enables users to view ATI performance metrics such as hardware utilization, vertex wait for pixel, pixel wait for vertex, overdraw and more. These performance metrics together with gDEBugger’s Performance Analysis Toolbar provide a powerful solution for locating graphics system performance bottlenecks. gDEBugger, an OpenGL and OpenGL ES debugger and profiler, traces application activity on top of the OpenGL API, letting programmers see what is happening within the graphics system implementation to find bugs and optimize OpenGL application performance. gDEBugger runs on Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems. (http://www.gremedy.com)

Shader Maker is a simple, cross-platform GLSL editor. It works on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. Shader Maker provides the basics of a shader editor, such that students can get started with writing their own shaders as quickly as possible. This includes: syntax highlighting in the GLSL editors; vertex, fragment, and geometry shader editors; interactive editing of uniform variables; light source parameters; pre-defined simple shapes (e.g., torus); a simple OBJ loader; and more. (Shader Maker)

The new gDEBugger V4.0 introduces gDEBugger Linux. This new exciting product adds 32-bit and 64-bit Linux Support, bringing all of gDEBugger’s debugging and profiling abilities to the Linux OpenGL developers’ world. A new Texture and Buffer Viewer has been added. This Viewer allows you to view textures, static buffers and pbuffers as images or raw data in its original format, including non-RGB data formats (float, depth, integer, luminance, etc). This version also includes significant performance improvements. gDEBugger, an OpenGL and OpenGL ES debugger and profiler, traces application activity on top of the OpenGL API to let programmers see what is happening within the graphics system implementation to find bugs and optimize OpenGL application performance. (http://www.gremedy.com)

gDEBugger is an OpenGL Debugger and Profiler. It provides the application behavior information a developer needs to find bugs and to optimize application performance. gDEBugger Linux brings all of gDEBugger’s debugging and profiling abilities to the Linux OpenGL developers’ world. gDEBugger Linux is now available as a final beta version. This version includes all gDEBugger’s features and supports the Linux i386 and x86_64 architectures. gDEBugger Linux official version will be released shortly after Graphic Remedy receive feedback from the field and fix any reported issues. (http://www.gremedy.com/gDEBuggerLinux.php)

According to an article on Extremetech.com , French company GPU-Tech has announced Ecolib, a series of C++ libraries for GPGPU which target both ATI and NVIDIA GPUs. A PDF describing the API is available. Their download page includes demo software with code samples and workstation CPU/GPU benchmarking tools.

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.