Hi Charles, > I am new to the viennacl library after going through some of the > documentation there was something I would like a bit of clarification. > Could please confirm if the NVCC compiler is indeed required to use the > CUDA backend or just for the makefiles of the examples? I ask this as I > have compiled CUDA programs simply with g++ previously. If viennacl > does require NVCC to use CUDA backend, could someone kindly explain why > this is so?
ViennaCL is a C++ header-only library, which has several implications: a) you can just copy&paste the source tree and get going. No configuration is needed, there's no shared library you need to build first. b) ViennaCL can provide neat operator overloads using expression templates c) each of your compilation units will see most (if not all) of ViennaCL's sources. If you enable the CUDA backend, your compiler will see all the kernels written in CUDA, hence it requires you to use NVCC. This not only includes the examples, but also your applications. We do not ship PTX-code and use the CUDA driver-API to get around NVCC, as this is too much of a burden to maintain. If you don't want to use NVCC, you can still interface to libviennacl, which compiles part of ViennaCL's functionality into a shared library. It is pretty much BLAS-like and focuses on dense linear algebra for now, so sparse linear algebra is not covered yet. Such an interface to a shared library is most likely how you've called CUDA-functionality in the past. I hope this clarifies things. Please let me know if you have further questions. :-) Best regards, Karli ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y _______________________________________________ ViennaCL-devel mailing list ViennaCL-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/viennacl-devel
