Officials from graphics card firm Nvidia have announced the release of the Nvidia Cuda SDK and GPU C-compiler public beta - first announced in November, Nvidia Cuda is a new architecture for computing on the firm's graphics processing units (GPUs), as well as the industry’s first GPU C-compiler development environment.
Developers can download the beta version of the Cuda SDK and C-compiler for Windows XP and Linux (RedHat Release 4 Update 3) from the
Nvidia Developer website.
According to Nvidia, GPU computing with Cuda offers a new approach to computing "where hundreds of on-chip processor cores simultaneously communicate and cooperate to solve complex computing problems up to 100 times faster than traditional approaches."
In addition, this architecture is complemented by the new Nvidia C-compiler for the GPU, which gives developers the necessary tools to solve problems in computation-intensive applications such as product design, data analysis, technical computing, and game physics. Cuda is currently available on the new GeForce 8800 graphics card and future Nvidia Quadro Professional Graphics solutions.
“The GPU is now a powerful, programmable processor that is ideally suited for computationally intensive applications such as seismic processing for oil and gas exploration, computing in bioscience, and financial modeling,” stated Andy Keane, general manager of GPU Computing at Nvidia. “With the recent introduction of Cuda technology, the parallel computing power of the GPU is now accessible to virtually any developer through standard C programming language.”
