Nvidia seeks 'PC soul' software
$5m could be yours
Nvidia wants to give you between $0.5m to $5m (£0.36 to £3.6m), plus partner with you on marketing, development, distribution, and more. All you need to do is come up with great software that exploits the processing power of an Nvidia graphic processing unit (GPU).
On Tuesday, Nvidia announced its new GPU Ventures Program and GPU Venture Zone website to support its new market-building effort.
The GPU Ventures Program is "all about building the GPU ecosystem," Nvidia spokesperson Andrew Humber told The Reg.
Nvidia is in good company. GPUs and GPGPU (general-purpose computation on GPUs) are quite the rage these days, with developers and manufacturers working to accelerate media, scientific apps, games, and other apps that can benefit from a GPU's massively parallel computational pipelines.
Outspoken Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang says "the soul of the PC is shifting quickly to the GPU."
GPGPU got a shot in the arm last December when the Khronos Group, an open-standards organization that focuses on developing APIs for dynamic media, released the OpenCL 1.0 specification, described as "the first open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors."
In other words, for GPUs.
Nvidia has its own such set of proprietary APIs, which it calls CUDA, that accomplishes much the same GPU-exploitation as does OpenCL 1.0.
OpenCL 1.0, however, is rapidly becoming an industry standard, having been adopted by over two dozen companies and organizations, including AMD, Apple (which first introduced it), ARM, Freescale, IBM, Intel, and Texas Instruments, among others.
Nvidia's CUDA is, well, Nvidia's CUDA.
And so you might expect that Nvidia formed the GPU Ventures Program to support its own APIs. But if you thought that way, you'd be wrong, according to Nvidia's Andrew Humber.
Even though Nvidia's GPU Ventures Program website makes no mention of OpenCL, and even though it says, "We would like to hear about your use of CUDA GPU computing software," we were assured by Humber that the APIs used by companies wishing to compete for support "need not necessarily be CUDA."
It's all about the GPUs, he said, not about CUDA.
And so if you're developing an application that leverages a GPU's parallelism, and your application is built using OpenCL 1.0, CUDA, or, for that matter, ATI's Stream SDK, Nvidia wants to hear from you - and maybe toss you a chunk of cash. You can find details of how to submit your proposal on their GPU Ventures Program website. ®
COMMENTS
Parallel programming crisis-schmisis
Parallelism exists in several forms - the most important being MIMD and SIMD.
MIMD can be a right bastard of a wanky one-eyed panicking Scottish prime minister in a financial meltdown to deal with -- however you do get greater control over how your parallel software beast scales.
SIMD is much, much easier to deal with, it's almost serial programming. But in general it does not scale as well - unless there are some clever compiler tricks, or as I suspect, inefficiency through overcomplication becomes an issue with your MIMD program.
So where is this all going?
- Firstly SIMD will be the way to go, eventually, of parallel programming. MIMD often requires considerable effort for too little gain. As SIMD compiler optimisation improves, the performance tradeoff will become less.
- Secondly, CUDA and the like work perfectly well in this paradigm.
- Thirdly, sorry El Reg, but OpenCL isn't the standard for number crunchers - GPU number crunchers only, perhaps. Most number crunchers are computational scientists, and many of them use, or use applications that use, libraries such as BLAS and LAPACK. MatLab, PETSc, etc. etc - they all use them.
As far as I know, Nvidia are the only ones going after this third, low-hanging fruit; once they've got a full, double-precision implementation within CUBLAS, a lot of people beyond university computer science departments will be very interested.
Linux.....
...sorry, thought it solved all the worlds computing needs....or so some would make you belive.
A Sign of Weakness
Not that this is a bad move by Nvidia but it leads me to conclude that neither CUDA, nor OpenCL nor GPUs are the answer to the parallel programming crisis. If monetary incentives are needed to motivate people to write applications for a processor, my bet is that something is wrong with that processor. What I mean is that there is something about GPUs that prevents them from being an ideal solution to general purpose parallel programming. That something is obvious: They are not universal and they are a pain in the arse to program.
The powers that be at Nvidia realize that they are in trouble. It is obvious that GPUs are not the answer and traditional CPUs are worse. We need a new programming paradigm and a new processor architecture to support the new paradigm. Nvidia should continue to milk as much money as possible with their current technology but they should invest their R&D money into something else. One thing is certain: Nvidia cannot say that nobody warned them.
How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis:
http://rebelscience.blogspot.com/2008/07/how-to-solve-parallel-programming.html
A computer with a soul = bad computer
Since when have computers meant to unstable and incorporeal, temperamental and prone to superstitions?
I sincerely hope I can buy my next computer from someone who defines their business model on things that are well defined and observable rather than the First Church of Glide.
