NVCC ignoring CUDA code? - cuda

Question

I have just installed CUDA 5.5 on my notebook and trying out using NVCC to compile a basic hello world program from this link http://computer-graphics.se/hello-world-for-cuda.html
The code I'm trying out is this:
// This is the REAL "hello world" for CUDA!
// It takes the string "Hello ", prints it, then passes it to CUDA with an array
// of offsets. Then the offsets are added in parallel to produce the string "World!"
// By Ingemar Ragnemalm 2010
#include <stdio.h>
const int N = 16;
const int blocksize = 16;
__global__
void hello(char *a, int *b)
{
a[threadIdx.x] += b[threadIdx.x];
}
int main()
{
char a[N] = "Hello \0\0\0\0\0\0";
int b[N] = {15, 10, 6, 0, -11, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0};
char *ad;
int *bd;
const int csize = N*sizeof(char);
const int isize = N*sizeof(int);
printf("%s", a);
cudaMalloc( (void**)&ad, csize );
cudaMalloc( (void**)&bd, isize );
cudaMemcpy( ad, a, csize, cudaMemcpyHostToDevice );
cudaMemcpy( bd, b, isize, cudaMemcpyHostToDevice );
dim3 dimBlock( blocksize, 1 );
dim3 dimGrid( 1, 1 );
hello<<<dimGrid, dimBlock>>>(ad, bd);
cudaMemcpy( a, ad, csize, cudaMemcpyDeviceToHost );
cudaFree( ad );
cudaFree( bd );
printf("%s\n", a);
return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}
It is supposed to print out "Hello world!", but after I compiled using "nvcc hello.cu -o a.out", my output is "Hello Hello", can someone tell me what is going on?

Answer 1

This was caused by a broken CUDA driver installation. A corrected installation allowed what was otherwise correct code to run without error.
[This community wiki entry was assembled from comments to get this question off the unanswered queue]