Nvidia, TopCoder Team for Parallel Programming Contest

Nvidia has joined forces with TopCoder, a competitive software development community, to sponsor a coding contest for developers interested in parallel programming on the Nvidia Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) platform.

The development contests, known as the CUDA Superhero Challenge, will be a series of contests for computer programmers who will leverage the parallel processing power of the Nvidia CUDA architecture to create new applications on the CUDA platform, the company said.

"PC architecture has evolved from central processing on just the CPU to co-processing on the CPU and the GPU [Graphical Processing Unit]," said Sanford Russell, general manager of the CUDA group at Nvidia, in a statement. "By tapping into the TopCoder community, we can educate over 200,000 programmers on the advantages parallel programming offers and fan the flames of the GPU Computing revolution."

The first contest begins Sept. 14 and will conclude Sept. 25. Nvidia will award $5,000 worth of prizes to five contest winners, who will be announced at Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference being held at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, Calif., from Sept. 30 to Oct. 2, 2009. Additional details about the CUDA Superhero Challenge can be found at www.topcoder.com/nvidia.

GPU Computing is the use of the massively parallel architecture of the graphics processing unit (GPU) as a computational engine using high-level languages and APIs, such as C and Fortran, or programming interfaces, such as DirectCompute and OpenCL, Nvidia officials said. The model for GPU Computing is to use a CPU and GPU together in a co-processing computing model.

"We have the world's largest competitive software development community representing more than 200 countries, and they are eager to display their talents in one of the fastest growing programming areas in the industry," said Rob Hughes, president and chief operating officer at TopCoder, in a statement. "We anticipate that the CUDA Superhero Challenge will generate many creative approaches to solving computing challenges and will result in game-changing innovations."