Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

CUDA 2.2 features visual GPU profiler

analysis
May 8, 20091 min

Also supports Windows 7 and has runtime performance improvements

Nvidia released CUDA Toolkit 2.2 to all developers today. As I mentioned in April when the beta shipped to registered developers, the toolkit includes a visual GPU profiler that now works on Vista (see figure below), a GPU debugger that now works on 64-bit Linux as well as 32-bit Linux, and a handful of new APIs introduced in response to developer feedback.

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The version that shipped today also supports Windows 7, has improved OpenGL interoperability, saves bandwidth by taking textures from pitch linear memory, avoids memory copy overhead by letting CUDA functions read and write directly from pinned system memory, extends asynchronous memory copying to Windows Vista, and allows an application to claim exclusive use of a GPU.

I didn’t have any trouble downloading or installing the new device driver, toolkit, and SDK. I’m not in a position to verify the claimed performance improvements over CUDA 2.1; what I can say is that the new version feels very solid on my hardware.

You can download the CUDA 2.2 device driver, toolkit, and SDK from the Nvidia site.

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Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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