NVIDIA today released the first public OpenCL conformant GPU drivers for Windows and Linux.
In addition to the drivers themselves, NVIDIA has released a powerful performance profiling tool and an OpenCL Best Practices Guide.
NVIDIA was the first to release beta OpenCL GPU drivers to developers in April 2009.This public release is fully conformant with the OpenCL v1.0 specification and supports the OpenCL Images features of the specification that, while optional for other vendors, provides significant performance benefits across many image processing disciplines such as medical imaging, Video transcoding applications, machine vision and facial detection.
Leveraging the extensive performance instrumentation in NVIDIA’s OpenCL drivers and hardware performance signals designed into NVIDIA GPUs, the OpenCL Visual Profiler provides developers with insight into performance bottlenecks and opportunities for optimization.
Key features include:
•Profiling of actual hardware signals, kernel efficiency, and instruction issue rate
•Timing of memory copies between system memory and GPU dedicated memory
•Customizable graphs to help developers focus in on problem areas
•Basic auto-analysis to reveal warp serialization problems
•Easy import/export to CSV for custom analysis
•Support for all CUDA enabled GPUs
NVIDIA has also prepared a helpful OpenCL Best Practices Guide designed to help OpenCL developers programming for the CUDA architecture implement high performance parallel algorithms and understand best practices for GPU Computing.
Chapters on the following topics and more are included in the guide:
•GPU Computing with OpenCL
•Performance Metrics
•Memory Optimizations
•NDRange Optimizations
•Instruction Optimizations
•Control Flow
•Performance Optimization Strategies
All of these OpenCL resources and more are available at developer.nvidia.com/object/get-opencl.html
Professional developers and researchers are invited to apply for early access to future releases at: developer.nvidia.com/page/registered_developer_[...]
