Nvidia Corporation, the inventor of the GPU, today announced the release of its OpenCL driver and software development kit (SDK) to developers participating in its OpenCL Early Access Program. Nvidia is providing this release to solicit early feedback in advance of a beta release which will be made available to all GPU Computing Registered Developers in the coming months.

“The OpenCL standard was developed on Nvidia GPUs and Nvidia was the first company to demonstrate OpenCL code running on a GPU,” said Tony Tamasi, senior vice president of technology and content at Nvidia. “Being the first to release an OpenCL driver to developers cements Nvidia’s leadership in GPU Computing and is another key milestone in our ongoing strategy to make the GPU the soul of the modern PC.”

At the core of Nvidia’s GPU Computing strategy is the massively parallel CUDA architecture that Nvidia pioneered and has been shipping since 2006. Accessible today through familiar industry standard programming environments such as C, Java, Fortran and Python, the CUDA architecture supports all manner of computational interfaces and, as such, is a perfect complement to OpenCL. Enabled on over 100 million Nvidia GPUs, the CUDA architecture is enabling developers to innovate with the GPU and unleash never before seen performance across a wide range of applications.