NVIDIA has released version 2.2 of the CUDA Toolkit and SDK for GPU Computing. This latest release supports several significant new features that deliver a major leap forward in getting the most performance out of NVIDIA’s massively parallel CUDA-enabled GPUs. In addition, version 2.2 of the CUDA Toolkit includes support for Windows 7, the upcoming OS from Microsoft that embraces GPU Computing.

Additional new features in CUDA Toolkit 2.2 include:

- Visual Profiler for the GPU

The most common step in tuning application performance is profiling the application and then modifying the code. The CUDA Visual Profiler is a graphical tool that enables the profiling of C applications running on the GPU. This latest release of the CUDA Visual Profiler includes metrics for memory transactions, giving developers visibility into one of the most important areas they can tune to get better performance.

- Improved OpenGL Interop

Delivers improved performance for Medical Imaging and other OpenGL applications running on Quadro GPUs when computing with CUDA and rendering OpenGL graphics functions are performed on different GPUs.

- Texture from Pitch Linear Memory

Delivers up to 2x bandwidth savings for video processing applications.

- Zero-copy

Enables streaming media, video transcoding, image processing and signal processing applications to realise significant performance improvements by allowing CUDA functions to read and write directly from pinned system memory. This reduces the frequency and amount of data copied back and forth between GPU and CPU memory. Supported on MCP7x and GT200 and later GPUs.

- Pinned Shared Sysmem

Enables applications that use multiple GPUs to achieve better performance and use less total system memory by allowing multiple GPUs to access the same data in system memory. Typical multi-GPU systems include Tesla servers, Tesla Personal Supercomputers, workstations using QuadroPlex deskside units and consumer systems with multiple GPUs.

- Asynchronous memcopy on Vista

Allows applications to realise significant performance improvements by copying memory asynchronously. This feature was already available on other supported platforms but is now available on Vista.

- Hardware Debugger for the GPU

Developers can now use a hardware level debugger on CUDA-enabled GPUs that offers the simplicity of the popular open-source GDB debugger yet enables a developer to easily debug a program that is running 1000s of threads on the GPU. This CUDA GDB debugger for Linux has all the features required to debug directly on the GPU, including the ability to set breakpoints, watch variables, inspect state, etc.

- Exclusive Device Mode

This system configuration option allows an application to get exclusive use of a GPU, guaranteeing that 100% of the processing power and memory of the GPU will be dedicated to that application. Multiple applications can still be run concurrently on the system, but only one application can make use of each GPU at a time. This configuration is particularly useful on Tesla cluster systems where large applications may require dedicated use of one or more GPUs on each node of a Linux cluster.

Developers can download the latest CUDA Toolkit, SDK, and drivers now at www.nvidia.com/cuda.