Free beta to play with
REMEMBER PEAKSTREAM, one of the participants in the
ATI stream event last fall? The firm is back with a new version, one that runs on Windows.
This morning, Peakstream announced a free demo of the Beta Workstation for Windows product, you can grab it
here. This new one is obviously a version of the GPGPU tools and VM that run on Windows rather than Linux.
As you can (possbly) see from the above, the new version has a plug in for MS Visual Studio which should ease the learning curve. It has in integrated debugger and a lot of visualization tools. You can set breakpoints and watchpoints in the GPU code itself, and view the data directly.
There are also some nifty visualisation tools, both current and historic views are available. The point is that the GPGPU code fits in well with the prevailing Windows tool sets and lets you twiddle the GPUs in a hopefully transparent manner.
One other nice feature they have is a profiler, something I have not seen yet for GPU code. Since coding for GPUs is fairly new and uncharted waters, this is quite a valuable bit. If you get a 10x speedup in your code, you will probably be ecstatic, but is it all that good if you should be getting 100x? Would you even look for a problem with a 10x speedup on the table?
As of now, the Peakstream tools run only on ATI hardware, but there are rumblings about an NV version in the pipeline. GPGPU code remains a fairly niche application in any case, the code will either be very applicable to what you do and run amazingly fast or not do what you want at all. There is fairly little middle ground here.
Two of the success stories Peakstream is touting fall into the categories of medical imaging and defense in addition to the ones talked about last year. It seems GPUs are really good at the types of calculations needed for tomography, so radiologists will have gaming rigs to play with when not peering into your guts. The same holds true for synthetic aperture radar. Both of these markets are not exactly cash poor. What it all comes down to is the Peakstream environment is now available for Windows and brings a much larger feature set with it. The beta is free to experiment on, so if you don't like it, no big deal. If it does fit your workloads, it is probably well worth the price.
The INQuirer
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