Thrust:sort does nothing

Accelerated Computing CUDA CUDA Programming and Performance
1

The following Windows app does nothing - keys remains unchanged. Stepping through it in the (Visual Studio 2013) debugger seems to skip the sort call. What am I doing wrong?
Michael
Michael

int main()
{
float values[5] = { 3, 5, 2, 4, 1 };
float *dV;
cudaMalloc(&dV, 5 * sizeof(float));
cudaMemcpy(dV, values, 5 * sizeof(float), cudaMemcpyHostToDevice);

int keys[5] = { 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 };
float *dK;
cudaMalloc(&dK, 5 * sizeof(int));
cudaMemcpy(dK, keys, 5 * sizeof(int), cudaMemcpyHostToDevice);

thrust::sort_by_key(keys, keys + 4, values);
cudaMemcpy(keys, dK, 5 * sizeof(int), cudaMemcpyDeviceToHost);
	
return 0;

}

2

read the thrust quick start guide on github - note what it says about thrust when you pass bare pointers to the algorithms.

Some options:

  1. Use thrust containers for the data, and use thrust iterators to reference the data, instead of bare pointers
  2. Set up thrust device pointers to point to your raw data, and use those in the algorithm
  3. Use thrust::device execution policy, to force select the algorithms device path
3

To follow up what txbob said, I’d recommend running your code through cuda-memcheck.

When you use raw pointers, you lost a lot of type information.

The Thrust algorithms are intended to use a form of tag dispatch to select between CPU and GPU versions of their algorithms.

In this case, it’s likely defaulting to the host.

I also recommend looking into thrust::device_vector and thrust::host_vector. Then you won’t need to worry about cumbersome cudaMemcpy’s and deallocating your memory.

4

Thank you!
Michael