cuda compilation question

Accelerated Computing CUDA CUDA Programming and Performance
1

Hi,

I currently have cuda setup with a portion of the code in visual studio c++ files, another portion in *.cu files on host side and some *.cu files on the device side (containing global functions). Now all the *.cu files obviously compile using nvcc, while the cpp files are compiled by visual studio. All is running great but I am curious whetther it would be possible to rename all my *.cu files on host side to cpp and have them compiled by VS; with only the device functions compiled by nvcc.
How would I then call the kernel functions since I cant include a *.cu file in the VS compiler. Is it even possible?

Thanks.

2

Yes, it is possible to rename and compile the host side code as .cpp files, but you will lose a few things like. For example, the syntactic sugar nvcc deals with, which looks like:

FuncName<<<dimGrid, dimBlock, sharedMem>>>(param1, param2);

Will have to be replaced with the underlying function calls:

  • cudaConfigureCall()

  • cudaSetupArgument()

  • cudaLaunch()

outlined in the NVIDIA CUDA programming guide (version 0.8.2) as ‘B.4 Execution Control’, or as 4.5.2.4 in version 0.8 of the guide.

I found it helpful to give the -keep option to nvcc, then search through the C intermediate files generated by nvcc for those three functions to see what the nvcc code looks like.

There is also a driver API described in section C.5, and outlined in Section 4.5.3.5, but I haven’t touched this yet.

HTH

PS: I am using Linux, not VC on Windows. I have every reason to believe the VC C++ compiler is used to generate the host-side code, so it should work the same way.

3

Hmm I see your point, thanks.

Especially since one never knows what new syntactic sugar is added in later releases.

Also will all the cuda functions from the cutil work?

Any more insights on this?

4

I am not a heavy user of the cutil functions.

I did a quick grep, and found several examples of ‘include.*cutil.h’ in the .cpp files in the SDK sample projects, and they compile and run okay. Also I took a scan across cutil.h, and I don’t see any nvcc specific extensions like shared, device, etc. in the header. Finally (doh! should have been first), the source in NVIDIA_CUDA_SDK/common/src is all .cpp, so I would expect the functions to be fine.

Edit: There is an SDK example using the driver API, e.g. cuLaunch, in simpleTextureDrv.cpp

This also uses th API to set up a texture, which may be helpful.