Karli,
My interest comes in my development of additional programs that would
utilize ViennaCL. I would like them to be platform independent so the
prospect of a header-only library is very exciting to me. I definitely
prefer the C++ template format to the C-functions so that is fine. The
less linking and the less shared objects to be created the easier the
program will be for future users to install and begin using the new program
(future users will likely not be heavy OpenCL or even C++ programmers). In
a perfect world, I would just like to include the header for the respective
function (OpenCL or CUDA) and compile the program.
That said, I realize this scenario is very unlikely. However, if a user
has a NVIDIA GPU, they also would need to have the driver and SDK installed
to use it appropriately. So perhaps my next best hope would be to just
include the header for a given CUDA function and then just link to the
original CUDA shared library (which would/should already be installed in a
standard location on the given OS).
What are your thoughts on this scenario?
Regards
Charles
On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 8:14 AM, Karl Rupp <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi Charles,
>
> On 05/26/2015 03:08 PM, Charles Determan wrote:
>
>> 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?
>>
>
> Yes, this is correct.
>
> Out of curiosity: Would you prefer to have all functionality available via
> libviennacl (using C-functions rather than C++ template stuff) instead?
>
> Best regards,
> Karli
>
>
> On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 7:47 AM, Karl Rupp <[email protected]
>> <mailto:[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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