Nvidia Debuts Nexus Integrated GPU/CPU Environment for Developers
October 7, 2009

Nvidia Debuts Nexus Integrated GPU/CPU Environment for Developers

Santa Clara, Calif. - Nvidia Corp. has introduced Nvidia Nexus, being called the industry's first development environment for massively parallel computing that is integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio, the popular development environment for Windows-based solutions and Web applications and services.
Nvidia Nexus is designed to improve productivity by enabling developers of GPU computing applications to use Microsoft Visual Studio-based tools and workflow  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, says a representative.

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 InspectorT 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 Nexus is scheduled to be available on Oct. 15.