I have a machine with a Quadro FX 5500, which I believe is NOT CUDA capable. I want to do some CUDA development on this machine but do my final testing on a machine I have limite access to which has a Quadro 6000 in it. My question is, is this even possible. Is there an emulation mode for CUDA?
WE
You’d either have to go back to ancient CUDA versions (pre-3.0, if my memory serves me right), or go through the hoops of installing ocelot. I can’t recommend either of them though if you are new to CUDA. It’s far better to get just any cheap Geforce card, as it is really difficult to get a grasp of the performance characteristics of CUDA hardware using a software emulation with completely different characteristics.
GPUOcelot has gotten a lot easier to install (at least on ubuntu) and it includes a debugger in emulation mode. Depending on how much you want to invest in programming CUDA/learning Ocelot, it might be worth a try.
If you are using Ubuntu, you can try one of the .deb packages here: Google Code Archive - Long-term storage for Google Code Project Hosting.
You should be able to figure out in a few minutes whether or not it works for you.