14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit 4.1 has just been officially introduced, meaning that life has become a little easier for everyone who relies on GPU computing in their research.
Now that GPU accelerators have become a relatively important part of the HPC (high-performance computing) market, NVIDIA has a very good reason to develop its CUDA Toolkit as well as possible.
After all, the parallel processing hardware cannot really do anything without a software.
That said, the CUDA Toolkit 4.1 comes with a new compiler, new imaging and signaling processing functions, and a redesigned Visual Profiler.
The new compiler is based on the LLVM open-source infrastructure and can boost application performance by up to 10 percent.
Also, the Visual Profiler can carry out automated performance analyses now, making it easier to accelerate applications.
As for the new imaging and signaling processing functions, they number in the hundreds and double the size of the NVIDIA Performance Primitives (NPP) library.
“The LLVM complier gave me an almost immediate 10 percent performance speed up, just by recompiling my existing real-time financial risk analysis code,” said Gilles Civario, senior software architect at the Irish Centre for High-End Computing.
“I can only imagine the additional performance gains I can achieve with additional tuning using the new CUDA release.”
CUDA Toolkit 4.1 will be sued by chemists, physicists, geophysicists, biologists and other researchers and engineers.
“The new visual profiler is amazing,” said Joshua Anderson, lead developer of the HOOMD-blue open source molecular dynamics project.
“With just a few clicks, it performs an automated performance analysis of your application, highlights likely problem areas, and then provides links to best-practice suggestions on improving them. It makes it quick and easy for virtually all developers to accelerate a broad range of applications.”
Getting the CUDA Toolkit 4.1 is a simple matter of going over to NVIDIA's website and clicking the download button. No payment is required.