Thank you Karli,
The ViennaCL library does appear to be impressive and I am excited to begin
using it. Just so I know I understand you clearly. Unless I compile the
libviennacl shared library (with dense linear algebra focuse) and link
against it I would need to use nvcc to compile a program I write with
viennacl with the intent to use the CUDA backend.
Am I understanding you correctly?
Charles
On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 7:47 AM, Karl Rupp <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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
>
>
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