NVIDIA's CUDA dev tool reaches GA

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NVIDIA announced this week that its Nsight plugin for Microsoft Visual Studio has reached production readiness after entering beta back in April.

nVidia NsightHigh performance computing (HPC) developers in fields such as oil and gas, bioscience and finance, are increasingly tapping the massively parallel processing capabilities of GPUs and Windows HPC Server 2008 to achieve significant performance increases in their work. NVIDIA Parallel Nsight connects these worlds, providing the professional tools required to develop and deploy HPC cluster applications.

“Research shows that developers believe the most difficult tasks when developing parallel applications are debugging, performance tuning and designing parallel algorithms,” said David Rich, director, technical computing at Microsoft Corp. “By integrating GPU computing into Visual Studio, NVIDIA’s Parallel Nsight is transforming the way GPU-based parallel computing applications are developed for Windows.”

Visual Studio developers can now use Parallel Nsight to debug CUDA C/C++, or DirectCompute applications on the GPU using the same familiar tools and techniques as on the CPU. Parallel Nsight also provides the analysis tools that give developers the information required to achieve the highest levels of GPGPU application performance.

According to NVIDIA, Nsight supports Windows HPC Server 2008, Windows 7 and Windows Vista, which works closely with Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Professional edition. You can download Nsight Standard for free right now, and you can also get the Pro version as a free time-limited download. Once we are passed all the launch hoopla, Parallel Nsight Professional will cost $349 for the first year and $299 for subsequent years. Nsight Standard will remain free. All the info is here (scroll to the bottom of the page).