#2782

Geek Vacation Day #1 & #2: GTC Tutorials and Keynote

So after I packed The Susan off home to Seattle it’s time to start my geek vacation in earnest… NVidia’s GPU Technology Conference.

Monday was a set of fairly low key tutorials but Tuesday’s keynote by Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA, was very impressive. I’m somewhat jaded when it comes to keynotes, usually I sleep in and avoid them entirely.

This one had a ton of cool demos, lots of them in 3D. Coupled with several announcements like CUDA-x86 from PGI and the new Nvidia roadmap beyond Fermi; Kepler and Maxwell.

On a more directly applicable note Nvidia released Parallel Nsight 1.5 and the CUDA 3.2 Tooklit with support for VS 2010 (you still need the VS++ 9 compiler) and I’ve been setting it up and porting my code over. There are a couple of sessions on Nsight this week. The pre-conference tutorial covered a lot of the basics and it looks really cool with support for profiling and debugging parallel applications actually running on the GPU.

In Other News…

I finally got bored of not having ReSharper style functionality when writing C++. Someone recommended Visual Assist X. Initial playing around with it suggests that  Whole Tomato are going to get my money.