Cuda error: an illegal memory access was encountered When working with LinkedLists in CUDA

Accelerated Computing CUDA CUDA Programming and Performance
1

Hi,
I am new to CUDA programming with LinkedLists and unified memory. My data structure is like this,
struct Element{
int value;
int yPosition;

    struct Element * next;

};

I have allocated memory for these array of structures in the unified memory. And my kernel code looks like this,

global void testkernel( struct Element ** adjacencyList,
int * vertices,
int* inputV, int * finalLevel,int * output){

int index = blockIdx.x*blockDim.x+threadIdx.x;

      if(*finalLevel>0 & index<*vertices){
      
      struct Element * traverse = adjacencyList[index];

if(traverse==NULL){
output[index]=0;

            }else{
                   
                    int ans=1;
                    while (traverse != NULL) {
                
                        int val = (traverse->value )*(inputV[traverse->yPosition]);
                        
                        atomicAdd(&ans, val);

traverse = traverse->next;
}

                    output[index]=ans;
            }

}

}

When I run my code I was uncounted with a Cuda error of an illegal memory access.

Next I debugged using Cuda-gdb,

[Switching focus to CUDA kernel 0, grid 1, block (0,0,0), thread (0,0,0), device 0, sm 14, warp 0, lane 0]

Breakpoint 2, testkernel<<<(1,1,1),(6,1,1)>>> (adjacencyList=0x1100004000,
vertices=0x1100000000, inputV=0x1100005000, finalLevel=0x1100003000,
output=0x1100006000) at bfsLLSMVP.cu:36
36 int index = blockIdx.x*blockDim.x+threadIdx.x;
(cuda-gdb) step
38 if(*finalLevel>0 & index<*vertices){
(cuda-gdb) print index
$1 = 0
(cuda-gdb) print *vertices
$2 = 6
(cuda-gdb) step
40 struct Element * traverse = adjacencyList[index];
(cuda-gdb) print traverse
$3 = (@generic Element * @local) 0x0
(cuda-gdb) step
44 if(traverse==NULL){
(cuda-gdb) step

CUDA Exception: Device Illegal Address
The exception was triggered in device 0.

Program received signal CUDA_EXCEPTION_10, Device Illegal Address.
[Switching focus to CUDA kernel 0, grid 1, block (0,0,0), thread (3,0,0), device 0, sm 14, warp 0, lane 3]
0x0000000000a4cb68 in testkernel<<<(1,1,1),(6,1,1)>>> (
adjacencyList=0x1100004000, vertices=0x1100000000, inputV=0x1100005000,
finalLevel=0x1100003000, output=0x1100006000) at bfsLLSMVP.cu:52
52 int val = (traverse->value )*(inputV[traverse->yPosition]);
(cuda-gdb)

Can anybody tell me why this is happening? Can’t we use linked-Lists inside CUDA kernels?

2

You can use a linked list.

Here is a worked example (however not using UM):

[url]c - Can CUDA Unified Memory used as Pinned memory(Unified Virtual Memory)? - Stack Overflow

Since your code is incomplete, there are any number of possibilities, but my guess would be either you have not done your allocations correctly or you are indexing out-of-bounds.

3 
#include <cuda_runtime.h>
#include <device_launch_parameters.h>

#include <stdio.h>

struct link {
  int value;
  link* next;
};

__global__ void kernel_walk(link* links) {
  for ( link* p = links+threadIdx.x; p; p = p->next ) {
    printf("%d:%d ", threadIdx.x, p->value);
  }
}

int main() {
  const int n = 10;
  link* links;
  cudaMalloc(&links, n*sizeof(link));

  link tmp[n];
  for ( int i = 0; i < n; ++i ) {
    tmp[i].value = i;
    tmp[i].next = &links[i+1];
  }
  tmp[n-1].next = nullptr;

  cudaMemcpy(links, tmp, n*sizeof(link), cudaMemcpyHostToDevice);
  kernel_walk<<<1,n>>>(links);

  cudaFree(links);
  cudaDeviceReset();
}

it works!

4

Thanks! It worked!