NVIDIA has released an OpenCL driver and SDK to developers participating in its OpenCL Early Access program. NVIDIA is providing this release to solicit early feedback in advance of a beta release which will be made available to all GPU Computing Registered Developers in the coming months.

OpenCL, short for "Open Computer Language," is a royalty-free standard for general-purpose parallel programming of heterogeneous systems. Developed and maintained by the Khronos Group, OpenCL provides a uniform environment for developing portable code for high-performance compute servers, desktop computer systems, and handheld devices using a multicore CPUs, GPUs, and parallel processors such as DSPs.

"The OpenCL standard was developed on NVIDIA GPUs and NVIDIA was the first company to demonstrate OpenCL code running on a GPU," said NVIDIA's Tony Tamasi. "Being the first to release an OpenCL driver to developers cements NVIDIA's leadership in GPU Computing and is another key milestone in our ongoing strategy to make the GPU the soul of the modern PC."

At the core of NVIDIA's GPU computing strategy is the CUDA architecture which is supported by programming environments such as C, Java, Fortran, and Python.