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Nvidia has announced its new Nvidia Nexus platform, the company’s development environment for massively parallel computing that is integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio.
Nvidia is an integrated GPU/CPU environment for developers working with Microsoft Visual Studio. Visual Studio is Microsoft’s development environment for Windows-based solutions and Web applications and services.
“Nvidia Nexus is going to improve programmer productivity immediately,” said Tarek El Dokor at Edge 3 Technologies, an early user of the technology. “An integrated GPU and CPU development solution is something Edge 3 has needed for a long time. The fact that it’s integrated into the Visual Studio development environment drastically reduces the learning curve.”
Nvidia Nexus improves productivity by enabling developers of GPU computing applications to use the Microsoft Visual Studio-based tools and workflow in a transparent manner, without having to create a separate version of the application that incorporates diagnostic software calls, the company said.
Moreover, Nvidia Nexus also includes the ability to run the code remotely on a different computer. Nexus includes tools for simultaneously analyzing efficiency, performance, and speed of both the graphics processing unit (GPU) and central processing unit (CPU) to give developers immediate insight into how co-processing affects their applications.
Nexus is composed of three components. One component is the Nexus Debugger. The Nexus ZDebugger is a source code debugger for GPU source code, such as CUDA C, HLSL and DirectCompute. It supports source breakpoints, data breakpoints and direct GPU memory inspection. All debugging is performed directly on the hardware.
Another component of Nexus is the Nexus Analyzer, which is a system-wide performance tool for viewing GPU events, such as kernels, API calls, memory transfers; and CPU events, such as core allocation, threads and process events and waits — all on a single, correlated timeline.
And a third component is the Nexus Graphics Inspector, which provides developers the ability to debug and profile frames rendered using APIs such as Direct3D. Developers can use the Graphics InspectorT to scrub through draw calls, look at any textures, vertex buffers, and API state in the entire frame Nvidia officials said.
A beta version of Nvidia Nexus is scheduled to be available on Oct. 15. For more information on Nvidia Nexus or to register as a developer, go to: www.nvidia.com/nexus.
Nvidia Nexus supports Windows 7 and Windows Vista operating systems and full integration within Visual Studio version 2008 SP1 standard edition or later, the company said.