NVIDIA has launched the production release of CUDA 6.5, the latest version of the company’s parallel computing platform and programming model. Available as a free download at www.nvidia.com/getcuda, version 6.5 of the CUDA Toolkit brings the power of GPU-accelerated computing to 64-bit ARM platforms.
CUDA 6.5 is designed to provide programmers a robust, easy-to-use platform to develop advanced scientific, engineering, mobile, and HPC applications on GPU-accelerated ARM and x86 CPU-based systems.
Additional performance and productivity features of the CUDA 6.5 platform include:
- Support for Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 – Expands host compiler support to include Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 for Windows.
- cuFFT callbacks capability – Delivers higher performance custom processing on input or output data by enabling programmers to specify callback functions that manipulate data in GPU memory before and during FFT processing.
- Improved debugging for CUDA FORTRAN applications (preview) – Includes new debugging support for FORTRAN arrays (Linux only), improved source-to-assembly code correlation, and improved documentation.
- Application Replay mode – Enables faster analysis of complex scenarios using multiple hardware counters.
- Updated CUDA Occupancy Calculator API – Frees programmer from having to manually configure kernel launches for each GPU architecture.
- New “nvprune” utility – New utility that prunes object files and libraries to only contain device code needed for the specified target architectures, reducing application size and improving load-time performance.
- BSR sparse matrix format in cuSPARSE routines – Support for Block Sparse Row matrix format added to more sparse matrix operations.
NVIDIA is hosting a series of webinars on the new features of the CUDA 6.5 Toolkit and parallel programming. Open to CUDA developers of all skill levels free of charge, the webinars will provide programming tips, best practices, and hands-on tutorials to help developers get the most out of programming GPU accelerators. Upcoming webinars include:
