The GPU Technology Conference: NVIDIA's New Focus in a Changing Market

Debuggers for All

Imagine this: NVIDIA’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang is making his keynote address at the GPU Technology Conference in front of a packed room containing some of the world’s greatest minds and everyone is silent. Then out of the blue, the crowd of intellectuals erupts in an impromptu cheer of both relief and happiness when mention is made of a debugger called Nexus that will be available for NVIDIA GPUs. You would have thought Jen-Hsun had just offered free Ferraris to everyone in attendance.

I will admit that even I was shocked by the enthusiasm shown for Nexus but the more I learned about this program, the more I was able to understand where the crowd’s applause came from. You see, to a programmer, having a debugger is like holding the Holy Grail.


At its most basic level, a debugger allows a programmer to simulate and pinpoint the source of any issues within the code of a program or which piece of hardware caused a crash. Nexus can be run through the industry standard Microsoft Visual Studio and includes debugging profiles for the GPU memory and allows for checking the kernels, shaders and other aspects necessary for GPU computing. The GUI also helps developers better visualize and track thousands of concurrent threads which are present when using a GPU for computational activities.

Below we have a quick video showing Nexus in action.


So what does this mean for developers? First of all the use of MS Visual Studio allows Nexus to be understandable to most of the programmers and developers out there without the need of additional resources being devoted to training. It also means that there will be less trial and error when it comes to finding issues with current and upcoming programs that use CUDA. This will allow more developers to gravitate towards NVIDIA’s architecture since doing so now means they have access to an efficient way to debug code.

Unfortunately, at this time Nexus isn’t available for DirectCompute 11, OpenCL or D3D11 but we have been assured that NVIDIA is hard at work making sure the next version of Nexus will incorporate these additions. The tentative release date for DirectCompute and DX11 support is early Q1 2010 and OpenCL-C debugging will come later in the year.