tiny kernel gives "unspecified launch failure" too many atomics cause failure

Accelerated Computing CUDA CUDA Programming and Performance
1

This tiny kernel gives “unspecified launch failure” on a GeForce GT 430. Lowering LOOP to 600 solves that.

I know this code is silly, but is it a hardware limitation or a hardware bug that I’ve hit?

#include <cuda.h>

#include <stdio.h>

#include <stdlib.h>

#define LOOP 1000

#define THREADS_PER_BLOCK (32 * 3)

#define BLOCKS 	100

__global__ void coalesce_shared()

{

    __shared__ float ff[1000];

    for(int i = 0; i < LOOP; i++)

        atomicAdd(& ff[threadIdx.x], 1);

}

int main()

{

    coalesce_shared<<<BLOCKS, THREADS_PER_BLOCK>>>();

    printf("Error: %s\n", cudaGetErrorString(cudaGetLastError()));

    cudaThreadSynchronize();

    printf("Error: %s\n", cudaGetErrorString(cudaGetLastError()));    

    return 0;

}
2

run it in cuda-gdb give me : CUDA_EXCEPTION_3, Device Hardware Stack Overflow

which means:

So the problem should be hardware limitation. You do 1000 times stacking the atomic add operations which is making some divergences by itself alone.

3

ikidntu, many thanks. Hmmmm… cuda-gdb, I should remember that. :)

Reza.