IntroductionGetting NVidia Cuda up and running when you are on a Visual Studio Express budget can be frustrating, particularly if you want to access Cuda functions from managed code. There are plenty of resources on line to help you on your way but you have to combine information from different sources – while avoiding certain dead ends. It’s a little hit and miss. I hope you can benefit from my journey so far. For now, I decided to keep it simple: use VS 2008 Express, write my own wrappers, and stick to the x86 platform. Here’s how I succeeded:
Background I have not configured Cuda for VS 2010 Express. I understand that part of the process requires configuring your 2010 project to use the VS 2008 (VC 90) compiler instead of the VS 2010 (VC100) compiler. Most likely there are a few other hacks required to get things going. There appear be some resources that provide direction on doing this. In particular, I saw one article that looks promising at http://blog.cuvilib.com/2011/02/24/how-to-run-cuda-in-visual-studio-2010/ Running managed code using configurations other than x86 did not work for me. There are several convoluted posts on the web concerning this configuration with VS Express. Google search “Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition And 64-Bit Targets” for some entertaining ways to break your VS Express install. Working out the install in a virtual machine first is a good idea but it was unclear to me how to access the host’s GPU hardware directly from my guest machine. My VBox virtual graphics adapter is not Cuda enabled and, as best I can tell, Cuda no longer easily supports the emulator mode. So I used the standard technique: make mistakes, break the install, reinstall, and follow the smoke. I am particularly interested in Fourier transforms on the GPU. Only a few of the canned wrappers sport CUFFT functionality. Cudafy (CodePlex) seemed the most promising but it’s not (yet) an out of the box set-up when you have VS Express.
Read more: Codeproject
QR:
Background I have not configured Cuda for VS 2010 Express. I understand that part of the process requires configuring your 2010 project to use the VS 2008 (VC 90) compiler instead of the VS 2010 (VC100) compiler. Most likely there are a few other hacks required to get things going. There appear be some resources that provide direction on doing this. In particular, I saw one article that looks promising at http://blog.cuvilib.com/2011/02/24/how-to-run-cuda-in-visual-studio-2010/ Running managed code using configurations other than x86 did not work for me. There are several convoluted posts on the web concerning this configuration with VS Express. Google search “Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition And 64-Bit Targets” for some entertaining ways to break your VS Express install. Working out the install in a virtual machine first is a good idea but it was unclear to me how to access the host’s GPU hardware directly from my guest machine. My VBox virtual graphics adapter is not Cuda enabled and, as best I can tell, Cuda no longer easily supports the emulator mode. So I used the standard technique: make mistakes, break the install, reinstall, and follow the smoke. I am particularly interested in Fourier transforms on the GPU. Only a few of the canned wrappers sport CUFFT functionality. Cudafy (CodePlex) seemed the most promising but it’s not (yet) an out of the box set-up when you have VS Express.
Read more: Codeproject
QR: