NVidia’s Nsight GPU Debugging tool has been in beta for a few months, but no longer as NVidia today has announced it entering the mainstream as a production tool for CUDA debugging. Right now you can head on over to the NSight page and get NSight 1.0 for free for all your CUDA, C/C++, and .NET programming needs within Visual Studio.
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.
In addition, they’ve taken the surprising step of splitting the tool into a Standard (free) and Professional (paid) version, with some extra new features. If you fork out for the Pro version, you get:
- The System Analyzer, a tool for timeline inspection and performance analysis
- The Ability to set Data Breakpoints, in addition to Code Breakpoints
- OpenCL Support
- Premium Support
The Professional version isn’t quite ready for release yet, so you can go over right now and get a time-limited trial (30 days) of the Release Candidate to try it out.
Both versions come with tools for graphics debugging and HLSL debugging, enabling such impressive features as pausing your graphic and selecting an individual pixel and digging through all of the various shaders that affected the final result. Perhaps the most powerful, and my favorite, feature is the flexibility in the debugging hardware environment. Of course, you can run everything on one machine if you like, but it can go far beyond that.
With a bit of configuration work, you can build a workstation with 2 Quadro cards, and exploit the SLI MultiOS support to run your debugger in the host OS, and monitor an application running on the second GPU in the virtualized environment. This will be great for those tricky ‘system locker’ problems.
But if you really want to go ‘extreme’, say you have an entire visualization cluster you need to debug or large arrays of QuadroPlex systems, you can use the new Networking feature. Connect over an ordinary TCP/IP link to the client machine and debug, analyze, and inspect your code from the comfort of your own desk.
All together NVidia has drawn a new line in the sand, defining the new standard for GPU/GPGPU debugging technology, and made NSight a must-have product for Visual Studio developers. The Analyzer tool will be great for those people trying to eek out the last few cycles of performance in their code, and the remote debugging features will be a welcome addition for anyone trying to debug on large-scale GPU clusters or graphics cards arrays (NextIO, QuadroPlex, Tesla, etc).
Read the full announcement after the break, and go check NVidia’s Site for the downloads!
NVIDIA Parallel Nsight Delivers GPU Computing for Millions of
Microsoft Visual Studio Developers
Massively Parallel Programming Now Available on Leading Windows Development Platform
SANTA CLARA, Calif. —Jul. 21, 2010—In a move that cements its leadership position in development tools for GPU Computing, NVIDIA today announced the release of NVIDIA® Parallel Nsight™ software, the industry’s first development environment for GPU-accelerated applications that work with Microsoft Visual Studio.
NVIDIA has also released CUDA™ Toolkit 3.1, an update to its CUDA software development kit (SDK), available here.
“With more than six million developers, Visual Studio is one of the world’s most popular development environments for Windows-based applications and services,” said Sanford Russell, general manager of GPU Computing at NVIDIA. “By adding functionality specifically for GPU Computing developers, Parallel Nsight makes the power of the GPU more accessible than ever before.”
High 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.“NVIDIA Parallel Nsight has become our daily development tool when working with our CUDA-based applications such as SimHD® and H.264 encoder,” said George Tang, ArcSoft’s vice president and general manager of Video and Home Entertainment Group. “The step-by-step breakpoint debugging on actual GPU hardware, as well as the performance analyzer, help to efficiently fine-tune our products, bringing the performance to the next level.”
Parallel Nsight also represents the premier environment for graphics development, delivering the DirectX 11 tools required by graphics developers to quickly and efficiently develop today’s top game titles and visual computing applications.“DirectX 11 delivers the technology for game developers to create immersive worlds, dynamic characters and more realistic game play,” said Anton Kaplanyan, lead researcher at Crytek. “Game developers are leveraging both the GPU and CPU to achieve these new levels of realism and Parallel Nsight is the first toolbox in the world that allows us to look under the hood of the GPU, and makes parallel debugging not only possible but pleasant, significantly accelerating DirectX 11 development.”
Parallel Nsight provides several specific features for graphics developers. The Graphics Debugger allows developers to debug all HLSL graphics shaders directly on the GPU. The Graphics Inspector allows real-time examination of DirectX rendering calls and GPU pipeline state to craft optimal GPU code, and Pixel History shows all operations that affect a given pixel, helping developers to quickly identify rendering errors and to create optimal rendering code. In addition, Parallel Nsight Analyzer allows OpenGL developers to optimize applications by presenting OpenGL API trace information on a timeline correlated with other GPU and CPU events.
NVIDIA Parallel Nsight software supports Windows HPC Server 2008, Windows 7 and Windows Vista, which works closely with Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Professional edition. To download the Standard edition of Parallel Nsight, please go here.
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA) awakened the world to the power of computer graphics when it invented the GPU in 1999. Since then, it has consistently set new standards in visual computing with breathtaking, interactive graphics available on devices ranging from tablets and portable media players to notebooks and workstations. NVIDIA’s expertise in programmable GPUs has led to breakthroughs in parallel processing which make supercomputing inexpensive and widely accessible. The company holds more than 1,100 U.S. patents, including ones covering designs and insights, which are fundamental to modern computing. For more information, see www.nvidia.com.
