NVIDIA today announced the latest version of the NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit for developing parallel applications using NVIDIA GPUs.

Nvidia said that the new NVIDIA CUDA 4.0 Toolkit was designed to make parallel programming easier, and enable more developers to port their applications to GPUs.

These are the three main features of the new toolkit:

- NVIDIA GPUDirect 2.0 Technology -- Offers support for peer-to-peer communication among GPUs within a single server or workstation. This enables faster multi-GPU programming and application performance.
- Unified Virtual Addressing (UVA) -- Provides a single merged-memory address space for the main system memory and the GPU memories, enabling quicker and easier parallel programming.
- Thrust C++ Template Performance Primitives Libraries -- Provides a collection of open source C++ parallel algorithms and data structures that ease programming for C++ developers. With Thrust, routines such as parallel sorting are 5X to 100X faster than with Standard Template Library (STL) and Threading Building Blocks (TBB).

The CUDA 4.0 architecture release also includes a number of other key features and capabilities, including:

- MPI Integration with CUDA Applications -- Modified MPI implementations automatically move data from and to the GPU memory over Infiniband when an application does an MPI send or receive call.
- Multi-thread Sharing of GPUs -- Multiple CPU host threads can share contexts on a single GPU, making it easier to share a single GPU by multi-threaded applications.
- Multi-GPU Sharing by Single CPU Thread -- A single CPU host thread can access all GPUs in a system. Developers can easily coordinate work across multiple GPUs for tasks such as "halo" exchange in applications.
- New NPP Image and Computer Vision Library -- A set of image transformation operations that enable rapid development of imaging and computer vision applications.

New Capabilities

- Auto performance analysis in the Visual Profiler
- New features in cuda-gdb and added support for MacOS
- Added support for C++ features like new/delete and virtual functions
- New GPU binary disassembler

A release candidate of CUDA Toolkit 4.0 will be available free of charge beginning March 4, 2011, by enrolling in the CUDA Registered Developer Program at: www.nvidia.com/paralleldeveloper.