Nvidia announced that it will be working with TopCoder, a competitive software development community, on the CUDA Superhero Challenge, a series of contests for computer programmers who will harness the parallel processing power of the NVIDIA CUDA architecture to solve some of computing’s biggest challenges. The first contest, which is open to all eligible developers, begins Sept. 14 and will conclude Sept. 25. $5,000 of prizes will be awarded 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 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. The model for GPU Computing is to use a CPU and GPU together in a co-processing computing model.

To learn more about the NVIDIA CUDA architecture or to accelerate programming skills for this challenge, Nvidia invites developers to attend NVIDIA Webinar tutorials and use the extensive self study materials available at www.nvidia.com/cuda.