Graphics company Nvidia has launched its inaugural Cuda Coding Contest designed to seek out the most talented Cuda programmers in the world.

Cuda is Nvidia's C language environment that provides access to the processing power of the GPUs found on Nvidia graphics cards.

The competition challenges C programmers to optimise an MP3 encoder to run as fast as possible on a Cuda-enabled GPU.

Contestants wishing to put their coding skills to the test will be provided with the source code of a partially GPU-optimised version of an MP3 Lame encoder.

They will then need to modify that code in the Cuda programming environment to gain further performance increases using the massively parallel architecture of the GPU. They must achieve the biggest speed up in run-time possible.

All submissions will be tested using the same sound file on a single PC running Linux.

The deadline for submissions is 25 July 2008 and the programmer who develops the fastest encoder will receive a $5,000 cash prize.