SANTA CLARA, Calif., Aug. 27 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- NVIDIA Corporation today announced that it will be working with TopCoder, a competitive software development community, on the CUDA Superhero Challenge, a series of contests for computer programmers who will harness the parallel processing power of the NVIDIA(R) CUDA(TM) architecture to solve some of computing's biggest challenges.

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The first contest, which is open to all eligible developers, begins Sept. 14 and will conclude Sept. 25. $5,000 of prizes will be awarded to five contest winners, who will be announced at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference being held at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, Calif., from Sept. 30 to Oct. 2, 2009. Additional details about the CUDA Superhero Challenge can be found at www.topcoder.com/nvidia.

"PC architecture has evolved from central processing on just the CPU to co-processing on the CPU and the GPU," said Sanford Russell, general manager of the CUDA group at NVIDIA. "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."

GPU Computing is the use of the massively parallel architecture of the graphics processing unit (GPU) as a computational engine using high-level languages and APIs, such as C and Fortran, or programming interfaces, such as DirectCompute and OpenCL. The model for GPU Computing is to use a CPU and GPU together in a co-processing computing model.

"We have the world's largest competitive software development community representing more than 200 countries, and they are eager to display their talents in one of the fastest growing programming areas in the industry," said Rob Hughes, president and chief operating officer at TopCoder. "We anticipate that the CUDA Superhero Challenge will generate many creative approaches to solving computing challenges and will result in game-changing innovations."

To learn more about the NVIDIA CUDA architecture or to accelerate programming skills for this challenge, developers are invited to attend NVIDIA Webinar tutorials and use the extensive self study materials available at www.nvidia.com/cuda.

About NVIDIA

NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) awakened the world to the power of computer graphics when it invented the graphics processing unit (GPU) in 1999. Since then, it has consistently set new standards in visual computing with breathtaking, interactive graphics available on devices ranging from portable media players to notebooks to workstations. NVIDIA's expertise in programmable GPUs has led to breakthroughs in parallel processing which make supercomputing inexpensive and widely accessible. Fortune magazine has ranked NVIDIA #1 in innovation in the semiconductor industry for two years in a row. For more information, see www.nvidia.com.

Certain statements in this press release including, but not limited to, statements as to: the benefits, features, impact and capabilities of NVIDIA CUDA architecture and NVIDIA GeForce GPUs; the advantages of parallel computing; GPU computing; the GPU computing revolution; and the impact of GPU computing; are forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to be materially different than expectations. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include: development of more efficient or faster technology; design, manufacturing or software defects; the impact of technological development and competition; changes in consumer preferences and demands; customer adoption of different standards or our competitor's products; changes in industry standards and interfaces; unexpected loss of performance of our products or technologies when integrated into systems as well as other factors detailed from time to time in the reports NVIDIA files with the Securities and Exchange Commission including its Form 10-Q for the fiscal period ended July 26, 2009. Copies of reports filed with the SEC are posted on NVIDIA's website and are available from NVIDIA without charge. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and speak only as of the date hereof, and, except as required by law, NVIDIA disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.

(C) 2009 NVIDIA Corporation. All rights reserved. NVIDIA, the NVIDIA logo, and CUDA are trademarks or registered trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. Features, pricing, availability, and specifications are subject to change without notice.

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