Visual Studio 2008 Setup with OpenCL Plugin

Can anybody point me to the official download location of the Visual Studio .NET 2008 Professional extensions (or plug-in) for OpenCL programming?

I have a Quadro FX 5600 on Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.8 and I run VMWare Windows XP 64-bit and its quite fast on my 8-core Xeon 3.2 (Early 2008 MacPro3,1 version; which is compatible with the OpenCL that will run under Snow Leopard).

So I presume I need to do 2 things:

  1. Upgrade to Snow Leopard (tried when it first came out and it failed; perhaps they’ve fixed a few things since then).

  2. Trust that my Quadro FX 5600 will finally be recognized (up to now under Leopard 10.5.8 and earlier 10.5.x versions it has not).

  3. Run my Visual Studio sessions in VMWare 3.0 (will upgrade from latest 2.x version I have) to get going in development.

It would be nice, since OpenCL will likely become a standard, if there were some OpenCL classes also developed for the FLEX4 SDK, or some method of calling OpenCL from FLEX4.

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help get me going. I’ve got a lot of horsepower here but have not been able to utilize it due to ordering the Quadro FX 5600 as part of my MacPro on the Apple Store and NVIDIA has not been responding to my requests to resolve this for about a year now.

I think it’s time to consider an ATI card. I’m a little uncomfortable with the CEO of NVIDIA being the Exec. Chair of the Khronos Group and in charge of validating AMDs submission for OpenCL (since AMD now owns ATI; I don’t like politics getting in the way of developers whose budgets are tight; NVIDIA doesn’t seem to care too much on this as again, they had some arrangement with Apple to sell the Quadro FX 5600 on the Early 2008 (Mac3,1) model MacPro I got yet they keep stone walling me and saying that it’s Apples fault that the device is not recognized as a CUDA device, and Apple Blames NVIDIA. I’ve had it with both of them.

My next system will not be a MacPro, and my next graphics card will not be a NVIDIA card, not one I spend my money on anyway. They need to earn some trust first by backing up the $3k I paid for the first card.

:!:

You will need to upgrade to Snow Leopard to get OpenCL on the Mac. I believe the Quadro FX 5600 is supported, but you should check Apple’s page to verify it. If the card works currently for graphics it is very likely to work under SL. If it doesn’t work for graphics now I don’t know if it will work under 10.6. There were some cards that required special drivers under 10.5 that don’t under 10.6, but I don’t remember the details.

Windows running in VMWare will not be able to run OpenCL on your card. You need to have full access to the card. You will have to run Windows through BootCamp to get OpenCL support under Windows.

The ATI cards for OpenCL are very different from the Nvidia cards at the moment. To get good performance from them you need to do everything in 4-wide vectors, which is a pain. Nvidia’s newest cards (Fermi) also have data caches which makes them far easier to use than the ATI cards. I would highly suggest a Fermi card for future OpenCL development as it will simply be far easier to get good performance.

The Quadro FX 5600 that was purchased at the Apple Online Store as the best graphics card option, indeed Does work as a graphics card, but is not recognized as a CUDA card by software. NVIDIA has been giving me the silent treatment on this and it’s really pissing me off, that’s why I’ve only considered ATI. I’m all for FERMI as long as NVIDIA changes their attitude regarding supporting customers shelling out $3,000 for a card.

I’ll try again to upgrade to Snow Leopard, but I have RAID0 x 250GB x 15,000 RPM drives (the best they had at the time in the Mac3,1 Early 2008 8-core Xeon Series), and I had problems booting Snow Leopard the very first time the machine was shut-down and I tried to start it up the next morning - I got a Folder icon or some Circle with a Diagonal through it. So I went back to Leopard, and it erased my time-capsule backup when I did. So that sucked.

Hopefully, whatever was wrong in the first release of Snow Leopard, is fixed now so I can try again to upgrade.

During my upgrade, can you give me a brief summary of what you would do in a situation of mine? I’ve never familiarized myself with Bootcamp even though I’ve been involved in Windows Dev. for over 20 years. I thought things would get better with Apple, but the INTEL-Apple relationship is a little to close it appears as just a few months after I spend a ridiculous amount of money on a MacPro3,1 - they come out with the Nehelem. When I purchased mine on Day #1 of “The fastest Mac on the planet” and then a few months later “The fastest Mac on the planet” depreciating my investment by a factor of 270% less performance. I think I know what a Nehelem is now. It’s where INTEL sticks its chips in Apples Nehelem, and Steve Jobs gets pleasure.

  1. 4 x 250GB @ 15,000rpm
  2. How can I gracefully upgrade to Snow Leopard and at the same time, potentially change the 4 x 250GB RAID0 to 3 x 250GB RAID0 for Mac, and save 1 250GB for Windows 7.

Is FERMI going to be the outside Rackspace Card that has an external ribbon to insert into a PCI slot? Or is it Windows 7 only?

My choice of OpenCL is that I don’t trust any of these bastards, Apple or Microsoft anymore. Microsoft patents the ideas of ISVs they invite to events, Apple overturns Hardware at an Unnecessary Level for Revenue (I always get heat for this but finally a Columbia University SI article came out about it) to gain revenue.

What I want to do is use OpenCL in Visual Studio .NET 2008 and then OpenCL in an Eclipse Browser that I suppose calls gcc / I know there’s a NVIDIA IDE but again, nothing recognizes my board. Not even the new Flash Player 10.1 test on NVIDIAs site. I used to really be devoted to NVIDIA, but no longer. Not after the treatment I’ve received in support. One Twinky eating support guy said, “Uh, that’s a Windows Card” another more informed says “Well it’s a Mac card because it will have a SKU on it for Mac and I don’t know if it’ll run under boot-camp.”

That’s why, if the day ever comes to get an AMD machine with OpenCL, it’s worth any pain to tell NVIDIA and Apple and Mickeysoft to go f’ themselves for not giving a crap about a customer paying thousands of dollars whose on a very limited budget trying to do research.