NVIDIA CUDA 6.5 Production Release Now Available

NVIDIA has launched the NVIDIA CUDA 6.5 production release, the latest version of its parallel computing platform and programming model. The CUDA toolkit brings GPU (graphics processing units)-accelerated computing to 64-bit ARM platforms. It enables a newly expanded range of efficient, HPC (high-performance computing) options to accelerate compute- intensive HPC and enterprise data center workloads, the company states.

CUDA 6.5 offers programmers with a platform to develop advanced scientific, engineering, mobile and HPC applications on GPU-accelerated ARM and x86 CPU-based systems.

Additional features include:

• Support for Microsoft Visual Studio 2013
• cuFFT callbacks capability that delivers higher performance custom processing on input or output data.
• Improved debugging for CUDA FORTRAN applications which offers Linux users debugging support for FORTRAN arrays, improved source-to-assembly code correlation and documentation.
• Application replay mode for faster analysis of complex scenarios using multiple hardware encounters.
• Updated CUDA Occupancy Calculator API (application programming interface) which frees programmers from having to manually configure kernel launches.
• New “nvprune” utility that prunes object files and libraries to only contain necessary device code for specified target architectures.
• Support for Block Sparse Row matrix format

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.