What?! CUDA::Minimal... works?
I wrote CUDA::Minimal back in late 2010/early 2011 and used it in some of my research before defending my Ph. D. dissertation in May of 2011. At my postdoc I didn't use parallel anything, so CUDA::Minimal languished. When I picked it back up, it didn't even compile on a modern version of Perl. It was disheartening, to say the least.
But now, once again, it works (as long as you're not using Perl v5.16)!!!
I was spurred to work on this based on some bug feedback that seemed to suggest a solution. This moring I fired up my machine with the CUDA-capable hardward and---thinking I already had the development headers I needed---tried to install ExtUtils::nvcc, a toolchain module needed by CUDA::Minimal. That didn't work, because I didnt' have the drivers installed. As of this afternoon, ExtUtils::nvcc will tell you that. :-)
I then spent an hour or so re-installing everything so I could run CUDA again on my Debian box. That's the thing about CUDA development: it takes some up-front cost to get it going. But once it's going, it's pretty fun. At any rate, you can see why I delayed work on this in the past.
I next turned my attention to CUDA::Minimal. The bug that showed up last I checked prevented the project from compiling, so I was a little confused when it compiled without errors on v5.18. It didn't pass the whole test suite, but it compiled fine. And... it seemed to pass a nontrivial part of the test suite, too!
After cleaning up the tests little bit, spent the rest of the day tracking down an alignment mismatch. I will spare you the details. The important part is that, using perlbrew, I have confirmed that I can run CUDA::Minimal on Linux for Perls v5.12, 5.14, and 5.18, both threaded and non-threaded! I haven't tested blead yet.
Back in February, when the compilation failed on the freshest non-bleed version of Perl, I threw my hands up in disgust and put the project aside again. I am so glad that it was just a temporary issue, and now I hope to start using git-bisect to figure out what is special about Perl v51.6, and if there is a hack I can employ on my end to make it Just Work.
I am deeply indebted to rafl and bulk88, and their help on irc.perl.org#xs for helping me isolate the alignment problem. #xs was recently resuscitated by the efforts of alh, and I am very glad to have had the help!
This is my blog about numerical computing with Perl.
hello David Mertens
will you the running environment be the virtual machine?
I did it in the vmware rh5.5 virtual machine.
I tried to install ExtUtils::nvcc, that didn't work, because I didnt' have the drivers installed. But I can not find the Nvida driver in vmware.
Could you tell me which driver can I use in vmware in order to install the ExtUtils::nvcc?
thank you very much!
ch
Well, the general rule is that CUDA in a virtual environment doesn't work because the virtual environment doesn't have direct access to the video hardware. Your best bet is to install Linux on the machine directly and install the necessary drivers. If you cannot do that, an alternative is to get an 8GB bootable thumb drive and install linux on that.
But, if you *really* want to get it to work in vmware, you might have some luck with rCUDA. I know nothing about it except what I found searching the internet today.
Good luck!
And here's this - with Perl 5.22, GCC 5.3.0, CUDA 7.5 anno domini 2016:
You have to do some hacking
/opt/cuda/host_config.h
to remain silent about gcc 5.3.0
ExtUtils::nvcc::Backend
to inject forced inlines to nvcc
push @nvcc_args, '-D_FORCE_INLINES=1';
as I wasn't able to do it on CLI
PDL build
https://sourceforge.net/p/pdl/bugs/407/
and finally hack 3 tests in t/z_kernel_invocations.t to match against "illegal memory access" instead of "unspecified".
cheers!