NVIDIA CUDA Superhero Challenge Sparks Competitive Fire for GPU Computing Developers

Developers Invited by NVIDIA and TopCoder to Tackle Parallel Computing with the NVIDIA CUDA Architecture.

SANTA CLARA, Calif.— NVIDIA Corporation today announced that it will be working with TopCoder, a competitive software development community, on the CUDA Superhero Challenge, a series of contests for computer programmers who will harness the parallel processing power of the NVIDIA® CUDA™ architecture to solve some of computing’s biggest challenges.

The first contest, which is open to all eligible developers, begins Sept. 14 and will conclude Sept. 25. $5,000 of prizes will be awarded to five contest winners, who will be announced at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference being held at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, Calif., from Sept. 30 to Oct. 2, 2009. Additional details about the CUDA Superhero Challenge can be found at www.topcoder.com/nvidia.

“PC architecture has evolved from central processing on just the CPU to co-processing on the CPU and the GPU,” said Sanford Russell, general manager of the CUDA group at NVIDIA. “By tapping into the TopCoder community, we can educate over 200,000 programmers on the advantages parallel programming offers and fan the flames of the GPU Computing revolution.”

GPU Computing is the use of the massively parallel architecture of the graphics processing unit (GPU) as a computational engine using high-level languages and APIs, such as C and Fortran, or programming interfaces, such as DirectCompute and OpenCL. The model for GPU Computing is to use a CPU and GPU together in a co-processing computing model.

“We have the world’s largest competitive software development community representing more than 200 countries, and they are eager to display their talents in one of the fastest growing programming areas in the industry,” said Rob Hughes, president and chief operating officer at TopCoder. “We anticipate that the CUDA Superhero Challenge will generate many creative approaches to solving computing challenges and will result in game-changing innovations.”

To learn more about the NVIDIA CUDA architecture or to accelerate programming skills for this challenge, developers are invited to attend NVIDIA Webinar tutorials and use the extensive self study materials available at www.nvidia.com/cuda.