Today NVIDIA announced the upcoming 4.0 release of CUDA. While most of the major CUDA releases accompanied a new GPU architecture, 4.0 is a software-only release, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of new features. With this release, NVIDIA is aiming to lower the barrier to entry to parallel programming on GPUs, with new features including easier multi-GPU programming, a unified virtual memory address space, the powerful Thrust C++ template library, and automatic performance analysis in the Visual Profiler tool. Full details follow in the quoted press release below.
SANTA CLARA, CA — (Marketwire) — 02/28/2011 – NVIDIA today announced the latest version of the NVIDIA® CUDA® Toolkit for developing parallel applications using NVIDIA GPUs.
The NVIDIA CUDA 4.0 Toolkit was designed to make parallel programming easier, and enable more developers to port their applications to GPUs. This has resulted in three main features:
- NVIDIA GPUDirect™ 2.0 Technology – Offers support for peer-to-peer communication among GPUs within a single server or workstation. This enables easier and faster multi-GPU programming and application performance.
- Unified Virtual Addressing (UVA) – Provides a single merged-memory address space for the main system memory and the GPU memories, enabling quicker and easier parallel programming.
- Thrust C++ Template Performance Primitives Libraries – Provides a collection of powerful open source C++ parallel algorithms and data structures that ease programming for C++ developers. With Thrust, routines such as parallel sorting are 5X to 100X faster than with Standard Template Library (STL) and Threading Building Blocks (TBB).
“Unified virtual addressing and faster GPU-to-GPU communication makes it easier for developers to take advantage of the parallel computing capability of GPUs,” said John Stone, senior research programmer, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
“Having access to GPU computing through the standard template interface greatly increases productivity for a wide range of tasks, from simple cashflow generation to complex computations with Libor market models, variable annuities or CVA adjustments,” said Peter Decrem, director of Rates Products at Quantifi. ”The Thrust C++ library has lowered the barrier of entry significantly by taking care of low-level functionality like memory access and allocation, allowing the financial engineer to focus on algorithm development in a GPU-enhanced environment.”
The CUDA 4.0 architecture release includes a number of other key features and capabilities, including:
- MPI Integration with CUDA Applications – Modified MPI implementations automatically move data from and to the GPU memory over Infiniband when an application does an MPI send or receive call.
- Multi-thread Sharing of GPUs – Multiple CPU host threads can share contexts on a single GPU, making it easier to share a single GPU by multi-threaded applications.
- Multi-GPU Sharing by Single CPU Thread – A single CPU host thread can access all GPUs in a system. Developers can easily coordinate work across multiple GPUs for tasks such as “halo” exchange in applications.
- New NPP Image and Computer Vision Library – A rich set of image transformation operations that enable rapid development of imaging and computer vision applications.
- New and Improved Capabilities
- Auto performance analysis in the Visual Profiler
- New features in cuda-gdb and added support for MacOS
- Added support for C++ features like new/delete and virtual functions
- New GPU binary disassembler
A release candidate of CUDA Toolkit 4.0 will be available free of charge beginning March 4, 2011, by enrolling in the CUDA Registered Developer Program at: www.nvidia.com/paralleldeveloper. The CUDA Registered Developer Program provides a wealth of tools, resources, and information for parallel application developers to maximize the potential of CUDA.
For more information on the features and capabilities of the CUDA Toolkit and on GPGPU applications, please visit:www.nvidia.com/cuda.
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