Nvidia Corporation today announced its full support for the newly released OpenCL 1.0 specification from the Khronos Group. OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a new compute API that allows developers to harness the massive parallel computing power of the GPU. The addition of OpenCL is another major milestone in the GPU revolution that gives Nvidia developers another powerful programming option.

Nvidia kicked off the GPU computing revolution with the introduction of Nvidia CUDA, its massively parallel computing ISA and hardware architecture. CUDA was designed to natively support all parallel computing interfaces and will seamlessly run OpenCL. Enabled on over 100 million Nvidia GPUs, CUDA has unleashed unprecedented performance boosts across a wide range of applications and provides a huge installed base for the deployment of compute applications using OpenCL. With support for other industry standard languages such as C, Java, Fortran and Python, only the CUDA architecture provides developers with a choice of programming environments to aid the rapid development of compute applications on the GPU.

First introduced with the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GPU and standard across all Nvidia’s modern GPUs, CUDA is the foundation of Nvidia’s parallel computing strategy. CUDA has had a tremendous reception from the world’s research community with scientists seeing up to a 20-200x speed-up in their applications with CUDA over a CPU. The CUDA architecture is being built into a wide range of computing systems from supercomputers and workstations to consumer PCs, enabling more than 25,000 developers to actively develop on CUDA today.

“The arrival of OpenCL is fabulous news for the computing industry and Nvidia is delighted to be playing a highly active role in the establishment of a new standard that promotes computing on the GPU,” said Manju Hegde, general manager of CUDA at Nvidia. “We are delighted that Apple has helped spearhead OpenCL. Their recognition that the GPU will now play an essential role in consumer applications is a significant milestone in the history of computing.”

Vice president of embedded content at Nvidia, Neil Trevett also holds the position of chair of the OpenCL working group at Khronos.

“The OpenCL specification is a result of a clearly recognized opportunity from leaders like Nvidia to grow the total market for heterogeneous parallel computing through an open, cross-platform standard,” said Trevett. “Nvidia will continue to be very active in the OpenCL working group to drive the evolution of the specification and will support OpenCL on all its platforms, providing developers an additional way to tap into the awesome computational power of our GPUs.”