Quasar Licensing

Quasar is a new programming environment aimed at taking care of many common challenges in heterogeneous CPU/GPU programming, e.g., automatic parallelization, memory management, load balancing, static versus dynamic scheduling, memory resource optimization. Quasar consists of a high-level heterogeneous programming language for CPU/GPU, with a similar abstraction level as Python or Matlab, making it particularly suited for algorithm design and rapid prototyping. In particular, the device-specific optimization techniques of Quasar allow highly efficient code tuning, resulting in a performance that is on a par with (or better than) hand-tuned CUDA code while requiring much less development time and being future-proof (i.e., existing code still retains its performance efficiency on future GPU platforms).

Quasar specializes in CUDA code generation and optimization, and several advanced compiler transformations and optimizations are integrated, allowing stencil, parallel reduction, parallel scan algorithms, etc. to be generated automatically for hardware agnostic user code. Quasar’s runtime system hides the complexity of GPU device management, memory management, transfers, dynamic scheduling and load balancing. Through automatic scheduling, code can be easily scaled from single GPU to multi-GPU implementations. Existing code can take automatic advantage of features of new GPU architectures, often without requiring any changes. Quasar can be applied in any compute intensive application that requires massively parallel processing, such as in image/video processing, computer vision, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

We are happy to offer a three month trial period, free-of-charge. After these three months, we offer either a 6 months license or a 12 months license for use of our integrated development environment (named Quasar Redshift), which contains code editing tools, advanced debugging and profiling facilities. Quasar Redshift’s  profiler extensively uses CUDA profiling tools API which gives access to low level kernel metrics.

Below are the licensing options:

	IDE	Runtime redistribution
Trial period (3 months)	Free	Free
6 months license (1 user, max 2 machines)	2.970 EUR (=495 EUR/month)	Contact us
12 months license (1 user, max 2 machines)	4.980 EUR (=415 EUR/month)	Contact us

 

Note that the IDE license does not offer the right to redistribute the runtime system to end users of applications developed using Gepura/Quasar.  In case you wish to do this, please contact us. The paid license includes a basic support option.

Software updates are provided on a regular basis, the IDE automatically checks for available updates.