APPLICATION DEVELOPERS can now download CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) for the Mac.

The firm has made its Beta CUDA for Mac OSX 10.5.2 toolkit ready to download from here.

The web site says: This code is released free of charge and can be used to create derivative works, whether academic, commercial, or personal. Please download a driver, Toolkit and SDK.

Molecular biologists are using it. John Stone, Senior Research Programmer, University of Illinois, is using CUDA for complex molecular systems simulation. He said: “The increased flexibility of the most recent generation of GPU hardware combined with high level GPU programming languages such as CUDA have unlocked this computational power and made it much more accessible to computational scientists."

The key to effective utilisation of GPUs for scientific computing is apparently the design and implementation of efficient data-parallel algorithms that can scale to hundreds of tightly coupled processing units.

"Many molecular modeling applications are well suited to GPUs, due to their extensive computational requirements, and because they lend themselves to parallel processing implementations. The use of multiple GPUs can bring even more computational power to bear on highly parallelizable computational problems,” Stone reckons.

And you thought it was just about shoot ‘em ups! µ