David Mertens

Over the summer I had the privilege of attending a week-long workshop on CUDA hosted by the Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering. It was was free for students from the University of Illinois (and other partner institutions, I presume) and it was excellent. If you want to learn CUDA quickly and you want to learn it well, I highly recommend attending such a workshop.

Over the fall I started writing and using CUDA kernels in my research. This meant writing code in C. C is a great language, but it is not known for its whipuptitude. Almost immediately, I noticed that my main() function did little more than manage memory and coordinate kernel launches. This, I thought to myself, is exactly what scripting languages are for, and wished there was something out there to let me manage CUDA memory and invoke CUDA kernels from Perl.

This is how I started down the path of writing perl_nvcc.