Scientists, researchers and mathematicians are some of the Mac users who will be happy with Nvidia’s news this week to release a beta version of the CUDA for Mac OS X 10.5.1 toolkit. The kit is released free of charge and can be used to creative derivative works for academic, commercial or personal use.
What is CUDA?
CUDA, which stands for Computer Unified Device Architecture) is a toolkit in the C language that enables the programming of CUDA-enabled GPU’s by Nvidia. It includes a nvcc C compiler, special libraries (CUDA FFT and BLAS), profiler, gdb debugger for the GPU and the CUDA programming manual. The kit also includes numerous examples of source code to help developers get started with CUDA.
There are several CUDA-enabled GPUs that work on the Macintosh, including the Quadro FX 5600 card and the GeForce 8800 GT, two of the latest cards shipping on the Mac Pro.
CUDA is being used for such things as molecular dynamics simulation, astrophysical simulations and visual molecular dynamics.
For more information visit: www.nvidia.com