NVIDIA does a great job at dragging their heels on OCL support and a heavy marketing push on CUDA. IMO they produce a much higher-quality product than AMD.

If I were NVIDIA I'd probably donate scores of servers+GPUs to schools like Caltech in order to inspire curriculum just like this.

Well,

I've looked at CUDA and OpenCL for my own development. I'd love to use OpenCL on the principle of openness and avoiding lock-in to NVidia.

But as far as I can tell, OpenCL is nothing like what a single developer would want to use for a large scale gpgpu program - it seems to be a layer that emulates all the varying features of all the manufacturer's chips to avoid advantaging any single manufacturer. Tons of boilerplate and none of the detailed "how to do X with Cuda" examples and manuals that NVidia has produced. It's not just that it's kind of hard and unfeatured, it's that given that it will basically continue to suck for the purposes of most gpgpu development, one can expect it to die or be suddenly replaced by something better. Basically, "open standards" from consortium of manufacturers have only existed to allow other large companies to produce just a few application on top of. I think any developer wants something they can "just program" and Cuda is miles ahead on that and seems likely to stay that way.

When I was learning this stuff, CUDA had better documentation (perhaps this has changed recently... I haven't done anything with GPUs in awhile), so it was a bit easier to learn. But my guess is that the instructor for this course happens to be more familiar with CUDA so they chose to teach that. Harvard has a similar course that used to be taught with CUDA and is now taught with OpenCL.

CUDA is generally considered a better API and more optimal (likely because of NVIDIA's driver support). Google's RenderScript is a close competitor that actually looks a lot like CUDA (probably for those reasons) as well as Metal (though not as much).

In one of the hottest area now, that is, Deep Learning, all frameworks use CUDA, not OpenCL.

Nvidia dominate the market.

sponsorship perhaps.