NVIDIA and Partners Form Industry's Broadest Parallel Computing Development Ecosystem

PORTLAND, OR--(Marketwire - November 17, 2009) - SC09 -- NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) and its ecosystem partners will deliver, over the next few months, the industry's broadest set of software releases to developers using GPU Computing in their work.

These updates feature major releases across a broad spectrum of GPU Computing development languages, tools and libraries. Included are updates from NVIDIA for its CUDA™ C compiler, with additional support for C++ and its upcoming GPU codenamed "Fermi." NVIDIA is also releasing its R195 driver that includes new extensions to its OpenCL 1.0 conformant driver and toolkit, and a beta release of the NVIDIA® code name Nexus, the industry's first development environment for massively parallel computing, which is integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio.

Alongside NVIDIA's own updates, several partner releases from industry leaders in software tools are available now, including The Portland Group's CUDA Fortran solution, Allinea's Distributed Debugging Tool (DDT) and the TotalView debugger.

"The only effective way to scale performance in demanding applications is to move to a parallel computing model," said Sanford Russell, general manager, GPU Computing software at NVIDIA. "The NVIDIA CUDA architecture facilitates this critical transition with its broad industry support and network of software consultants and training resources for massively parallel computing."

Updates to NVIDIA and its partners' parallel computing development tools include the following:

CUDA Toolkit 3.0 Beta: With the CUDA Toolkit 3.0 Beta, developers can start developing applications today for the NVIDIA Fermi architecture. This beta release includes features such as ECC reporting, Dual DMA Engine, Concurrent Kernel Execution and NVIDIA Fermi HW debugging support in cuda-gdb. Performance profiling is included for both CUDA Visual Profiler and the OpenCL Visual Profiler. Also included is support for a new unified interoperability API for Direct3D and OpenGL including Direct3D 11.

OpenCL 1.0 Extensions: NVIDIA is the only vendor supporting OpenCL features beyond the minimum conformance level. New extensions released by NVIDIA include support for double precision, OpenGL interoperability and the new OpenCL Installable Client Device (ICD). These new features supplement existing NVIDIA-only support for 2D image, 32-bit atomics and byte addressable stores.

NVIDIA "Nexus," the codename for the industry's first development environment for massively parallel GPU applications, integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio IDE: Comprised of a Debugger, Performance Analyzer and Graphics Inspector, this beta release gives GPU Computing developers an immediate boost in productivity through common and easy to use tools.

The Portland Group (PGI) -- CUDA Fortran: Production release of the world's first Fortran compiler compatible with the NVIDIA CUDA-enabled GPUs. CUDA Fortran will accelerate the adoption of GPU Computing in areas where applications are written in Fortran, such as ocean modeling, weather forecasting, environmental modeling, seismic analysis, bioinformatics and other areas.

Professional HPC Debugging Solutions from Allinea and TotalView were also launched this week. These tools provide CUDA GPU features that complement existing capabilities for parallel debugging using MPI, OpenMP and pthreads on the Linux platform. It enables developers to debug applications that are running on hybrid clusters of x86-64 CPUs and Tesla GPU-based servers.

Numerical Analysis Packages: Significant advances in the use of CUDA-enabled GPUs have also been made in prominent numerical analysis and mathematical modeling packages such as MATLAB from Mathworks, Mathematica from Wolfram Research and LabVIEW from National Instruments.

CUDA Libraries: In addition, developers can take advantage of a rich set of CUDA-accelerated libraries available from NVIDIA and its partners including BLAS, FFT, LAPACK (EM Photonics CULA), MAGMA (ICL at the UTK), NVIDIA Performance Primitives (NPP), CUDA Vision Workbench (CVWB) and video and image processing libraries.

To accelerate the momentum of CUDA optimized tools and applications, customers can take advantage of worldwide training and consultancy services offered by a growing number of CUDA Consultants, such as Acceleware Corp., ANEO, CAPS, Elegant Mathematics, EM Photonics, Fixstars, GASS Ltd., HPC Project, Infosys, SagivTech, Stone Ridge Technology and Tech-X Corp.

The breadth of languages, APIs, libraries and other tools that are now supported by NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs) based on the CUDA parallel processing architecture represent the industry's most flexible and pervasive set of tools available for parallel computing today.

About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) awakened the world to the power of computer graphics when it invented the graphics processing unit (GPU) in 1999. Since then, it has consistently set new standards in visual computing with breathtaking, interactive graphics available on devices ranging from portable media players to notebooks to workstations. NVIDIA's expertise in programmable GPUs has led to breakthroughs in parallel processing which make supercomputing inexpensive and widely accessible. Fortune magazine has ranked NVIDIA #1 in innovation in the semiconductor industry for two years in a row. For more information, see www.nvidia.com.

Certain statements in this press release including, but not limited to, statements as to: parallel computing; the benefits, features, impact, and capabilities of CUDA architecture and the updates to the parallel computing development tools; are forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to be materially different than expectations. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include: development of more efficient or faster technology; design, manufacturing or software defects; the impact of technological development and competition; changes in consumer preferences and demands; customer adoption of different standards or our competitor's products; changes in industry standards and interfaces; unexpected loss of performance of our products or technologies when integrated into systems as well as other factors detailed from time to time in the reports NVIDIA files with the Securities and Exchange Commission including its Form 10-Q for the fiscal period ended July 26, 2009. Copies of reports filed with the SEC are posted on our website and are available from NVIDIA without charge. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and speak only as of the date hereof, and, except as required by law, NVIDIA disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.

© 2009 NVIDIA Corporation. All rights reserved. NVIDIA, the NVIDIA logo, Tesla, Fermi and CUDA are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. Features, pricing, availability, and specifications are subject to change without notice.

Contact Information: For more information, contact: Andrew Humber NVIDIA Corporation (408) 486 8138 ahumber@nvidia.com