MemtestG80 is a software-based tester to test for “soft errors” in GPU memory or logic for NVIDIA CUDA-enabled GPUs. It uses a variety of proven test patterns (some custom and some based on Memtest86) to verify the correct operation of GPU memory and logic. It is a useful tool to ensure that given GPUs do not produce “silent errors” which may corrupt the results of a computation without triggering an overt error.

Precompiled binaries for Windows, Linux and OSX, as well as the source code, are available for download under the LGPL license. MemtestG80 is developed by Imran Haque and Vijay Pande.

GPUmat, developed by the GP-You Group, allows Matlab code to benefit from the compute power of modern GPUs. It is built on top of NVIDIA CUDA. The  acceleration is transparent to the user, only the declaration of variables needs to be changed using new GPU-specific keywords. Algorithms need not be changed. A wide range of standard Matlab functions have been implemented.  GPUmat is available as freeware for Windows and Linux from the GP-You download page.

Abstract:

This paper explores the challenges in implementing a message passing interface usable on systems with data-parallel processors. As a case study, we design and implement the “DCGN” API on NVIDIA GPUs that is similar to MPI and allows full access to the underlying architecture. We introduce the notion of data-parallel thread-groups as a way to map resources to MPI ranks. We use a method that also allows the data-parallel processors to run autonomously from user-written CPU code. In order to facilitate communication, we use a sleep-based polling system to store and retrieve messages. Unlike previous systems, our method provides both performance and flexibility. By running a test suite of applications with different communication requirements, we find that a tolerable amount of overhead is incurred, somewhere between one and five percent depending on the application, and indicate the locations where this overhead accumulates. We conclude that with innovations in chipsets and drivers, this overhead will be mitigated and provide similar performance to typical CPU based MPI implementations while providing fully-dynamic communication.

(Jeff A. Stuart and John D. Owens, Message Passing on Data-Parallel Architectures, Proceedings of the 23rd IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium)

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)