NVIDIA Introduces Nexus, The Industry’s First IDE for Developers Working with MS VS

[btarunr]

NVIDIA Corp. today introduced NVIDIA Nexus, the industry’s first development environment for massively parallel computing that is integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio, the world’s most popular development environment for Windows-based solutions and Web applications and services.

“NVIDIA Nexus is going to improve programmer productivity immediately,” said Tarek El Dokor at Edge 3 Technologies. “An integrated GPU and CPU development solution is something Edge 3 has needed for a long time. The fact that it’s integrated into the Visual Studio development environment drastically reduces the learning curve.”

NVIDIA Nexus radically improves productivity by enabling developers of GPU computing applications to use the popular Microsoft Visual Studio-based tools and workflow in a transparent manner, without having to create a separate version of the application that incorporates diagnostic software calls. NVIDIA Nexus also includes the ability to run the code remotely on a different computer. Nexus includes advanced tools for simultaneously analyzing efficiency, performance, and speed of both the graphics processing unit (GPU) and central processing unit (CPU) to give developers immediate insight into how co-processing affects their applications.

Nexus is composed of three components:

• The Nexus Debugger is a source code debugger for GPU source code, such as CUDA C, HLSL and DirectCompute. It supports source breakpoints, data breakpoints and direct GPU memory inspection. All debugging is performed directly on the hardware.
• The Nexus Analyzer is a system-wide performance tool for viewing GPU events (kernels, API calls, memory transfers) and CPU events (core allocation, threads and process events and waits)—all on a single, correlated timeline.
• The Nexus Graphics Inspector provides developers the ability to debug and profile frames rendered using APIs such as Direct3D. Developers can use the Graphics Inspector™ to scrub through draw calls, look at any textures, vertex buffers, and API state in the entire frame.

The NVIDIA Nexus supports Windows 7 and Windows Vista operating systems and full integration within Visual Studio (2008 SP1 standard edition or later).

A BETA version of NVIDIA Nexus is scheduled to be available on Oct. 15. For more information on NVIDIA Nexus or to register as a developer, please visit this page.

Developers can register for the BETA program in person at the GPU Tech Conference, being held this week in San Jose, Calif. Both standard and professional versions of NVIDIA Nexus will be available upon final release.

[Solaris17]

very intresting

[wolf]

Originally Posted by Solaris17

very intresting

indeed.

[Sihastru]

Most important news since the launch of G92 and it will pass unnoticed because nobody knows what it means ) It's sad.

[wrathchild_67]

This sounds awesome, especially if they also include Intellisense functionality (which I'm guessing it does). I'm only a mediocre programmer but this new IDE opens some interesting possibilities. Can you say GPU accelerated 7-zip? It was possible before this announcement, but now it just got easier to implement. I would actually take a stab at it now with VS2008 support.

[CharlO]

It sure does and I'm one too :P

Nevertheless I don't really like nVidia getting soo Microsoft centered, don't get me wrong, I'm not anti Windows nor anything like, but I like to have different options to program.

[mdm-adph]

...and it's bloody opportunities like this that ATI misses. :P

[dazed554]

this doesn't seem to be an actual IDE, but merely a plugin for visual studio...

[Sihastru]

Originally Posted by CharlO

It sure does and I'm one too :P

Nevertheless I don't really like nVidia getting soo Microsoft centered, don't get me wrong, I'm not anti Windows nor anything like, but I like to have different options to program.

Do you mean like DirectX is so Microsoft centered? Like DirectCompute is so Microsoft centered? Like most PC games are so Microsoft centered? Like 93% of the computers in the entire world are so Microsoft centered?

It is a requirement of the market they are competing in. It's not really a choice. They provide drivers for Linux that contain most things that are in the Windows versions, with the obvious omissions. They are involved in the mobile market with their Tegra chips. They are involved in the Apple market since their cards are used in Apple computers.

So they cover the PC market (Windows + Linux), server market (Tesla), Apple market (Mac OS) and the mobile market (mobile phones, personal media players, gps enabled devices, TV sets etc. with Tegra, right now used only in a Microsoft product, the Zune HD).

What else is there to be involved in so that would warrant the time and money for the investment? Power boats? Surface to air missiles? Attack dogs?