Nvidia launches CUDA Superhero Challenge

SANTA CLARA, USA: Aimed at encouraging the programmer community, US-based graphics chip maker Nvidia Corp has lined up a slew of prizes to programmers who use the Cuda specifications.

The company said it will be offering prizes worth $5,000 to five programmers who use the Cuda parallel programming environment to solve the first of a series of challenges. Nvidia has posted the Cuda Superhero challenges at www.topcoder.com/nvidia.

According to Sanford Russell, general manager of the Cuda group at Nvidia, PC architecture has evolved from central processing on just the CPU to co-processing on the CPU and the GPU. He added: "By tapping into the TopCoder community, we can educate over 200,000 programmers on the advantages parallel programming offers and fan the flames of the GPU computing revolution."

The company has said that the first contest will get underway on September 14 to 25. From among the participants, as many as five winners will be announced at Nvidia's GPU technology conference to be held from September 30 to October 2. It is, however, not known as to what the challenge would be. The industry expects that the CUDA Superhero Challenge could lead to a handful of creative approaches to solving computing challenges .