From PC World: Nvidia has made improvements to its underlying software tools to make it easier to write programs for faster execution across CPUs and graphics processors.
The company on Thursday announced CUDA 6, which will make programming easier for supercomputers, servers, PCs and, to a lesser extent, smartphones. The goal of CUDA is to provide underlying tools so programmers can off-load processing from CPUs to GPUs, which is faster for technical and graphics applications.
CUDA 6 offers unified memory, an advanced management feature that makes GPU memory as readily accessible as CPU memory. Previously, data had to be moved from CPUs to GPUs for execution and then moved back, creating two data pools. But with unified memory, a developer doesn't have to manage where data is to take advantage of the GPU.
The memory management feature will figure out whether to dispatch data to CPU or GPU memory, and that will reduce the need for programmers to add lines of code to define where the data should be sent, said Sumit Gupta, general manager of Tesla Accelerated Computing products at Nvidia.
The developer doesn't have to worry about GPU and CPU memory because those won't be handled by programming but by directives in CUDA, said Dan Olds, principal analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group.
"This addition to CUDA is evolutionary, not revolutionary," Olds said.
For example, GPUs are often used in servers for desktop virtualization and automating memory placement could speed up the deployment of OS instances via virtual machines, Olds said.
View: Article @ Source Site
