NVIDIA Corp. today introduced NVIDIA Nexus, the industry's first development environment for massively parallel computing that is integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio, the world's most popular development environment for Windows-based solutions and Web applications and services.

"NVIDIA Nexus is going to improve programmer productivity immediately," said Tarek El Dokor at Edge 3 Technologies. "An integrated GPU and CPU development solution is something Edge 3 has needed for a long time. The fact that it's integrated into the Visual Studio development environment drastically reduces the learning curve."

NVIDIA Nexus radically improves productivity by enabling developers of GPU computing applications to use the popular Microsoft Visual Studio-based tools and workflow in a transparent manner, without having to create a separate version of the application that incorporates diagnostic software calls. NVIDIA Nexus also includes the ability to run the code remotely on a different computer. Nexus includes advanced tools for simultaneously analyzing efficiency, performance, and speed of both the graphics processing unit (GPU) and central processing unit (CPU) to give developers immediate insight into how co-processing affects their applications.

Nexus is composed of three components:

• The Nexus Debugger is a source code debugger for GPU source code, such as CUDA C, HLSL and DirectCompute. It supports source breakpoints, data breakpoints and direct GPU memory inspection. All debugging is performed directly on the hardware.
• The Nexus Analyzer is a system-wide performance tool for viewing GPU events (kernels, API calls, memory transfers) and CPU events (core allocation, threads and process events and waits)-all on a single, correlated timeline.
• The Nexus Graphics Inspector provides developers the ability to debug and profile frames rendered using APIs such as Direct3D. Developers can use the Graphics Inspector to scrub through draw calls, look at any textures, vertex buffers, and API state in the entire frame.

The NVIDIA Nexus supports Windows 7 and Windows Vista operating systems and full integration within Visual Studio (2008 SP1 standard edition or later).

A BETA version of NVIDIA Nexus is scheduled to be available on Oct. 15. For more information on NVIDIA Nexus or to register as a developer, please visit this page.

Developers can register for the BETA program in person at the GPU Tech Conference, being held this week in San Jose, Calif. Both standard and professional versions of NVIDIA Nexus will be available upon final release.