Use NVIDA card for CUDA, motherboard for video - cuda

I want use the motherboard as the primary display adapter and my NVIDIA graphics card as a dedicated CUDA processor. My first thought was to simply plug the monitor's VGA cable into the motherboard's VGA port and hope the BIOS was smart enough to use the on-board video as the display adapter when it booted. That didn't work. The BIOS must have detected the NVIDIA card and continued to use it as the display adapter. The next thing I looked for was a setting in the BIOS to tell it "don't use the the NVIDIA 560 as the display adapter, use the on-board video as the display adapter". I search through the BIOS and the Web, but either this cannot be done or I cannot figure out how to do it. The mobo is a BIOSTAR TH67+ LGA 1155. Windows 7 OS.
RESULTS SUMMARY (from answers provided below)
Enabling the Integrated Graphics Device (IGD) in the BIOS will allow the system to be driven from the on-board graphics even with the graphics card connected to the system bus. However, the graphics card cannot be used for CUDA processing. Windows will not enable graphics devices unless a monitor is attached to them. The normal driver stack cannot see them. Solution: use Linux, or attach a display to the graphics card but do not use it. The Tesla cards (GPGPU-only) are not recognized by Windows as graphics devices, so they don't suffer from this.
Also ,a newer BIOSTAR motherboard, the TZ68A+, supports the Virtu drivers which permit sophisticated simultaneous use of the graphics cards and on-board video.

Looking at the BIOS manual (.zip), the setting you probably want is Chipset -> North Bridge -> Initiate Graphics Adapter. Try setting it to IGD (Integrated Graphics Device).

I believe this will happen automatically as the native video won't support CUDA. After installing the SDK, if you run DeviceQuery, do you see more than one result?

I believe h67 allows coexistence of both integrated & dedicated GPU. Check out Lucid Virtu here http://www.lucidlogix.com/driverdownloads-virtu.html it allows switching GPUs on the fly. But I don't know if it affects CUDA device query.
I never tried it on my rig, because its x58, I just heard it from tomshardware. Try it out and let us know. Lucid Virtu is definitely worth a try, its free, and it can cut you electric bill.

Related

Can I debug CUDA on the device that drives the display output?

I develop on VS2012. I have 3 monitors connected to my pc with one GTX 960 graphic card.
I knew that it's impossible to debug CUDA on the same device that drives the display output. Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but when I go to NSight->Windows->System Info->Display Devices, I can see that the monitor uses my graphic card. Since I have only one graphic card and I can debug (as the image shows in CUDA WarpWatch1) I deduct that either I do can debug on the same device that drives the display output or it uses my built-in Intel HD Graphics but doesn't show it in the Display Device .
Despite what you have apparently read somewhere, CUDA (and NSight) has supported debugging on GPUs with the WDDM driver on active display GPUs for a number of years. You can see the exact matrix of supported hardware, drviers and debugging modes in the documentation here.
When CUDA was first introduced, debugging was limited to non-display cards. However, this limitation was removed on Windows and Linux using more recent hardware some time ago.

Developing for CUDA on "cheap" GPUs

I develop algorithms in CUDA on my desktop which should later run on a server.
Is it okay to use a recent low end card (like compute capability 2.1) to get all the nice debug and profiling features and then put the code on the server with the high end card (with the same cc)? Would I just need to adjust the thread/mesh sizes, or does it change everything™.
Example: I would develop on a Quadro 600 and the server would use a Tesla C2075.
As long your kernel call and kernel itself is scalable you have no problem.
Check out this question:
CUDA development on different cards?
There are some issues, like memory bandwith being different (25.6 GiB/s on Quadro and 148 GiB/s on Tesla, according to your links), or different number of SMs (the driver could distribute blocks across SMs differently). However, in most cases such small diffrences are of minor importance.
If the server has more than one GPU installed then you need to change your code to run on Multi-GPU to fully leverage the power of the server. Although the same code will run fine but on a single card.
In case there's only one card on server; general rule of thumb is that you do not need to change any line of code to harness the power of the stronger GPU as the driver distributes the load among SMs automatically.

Can't run CUDA nor OpenCL on GeForce 540M

I have problem running samples provided by Nvidia in their GPU Computing SDK (there's a library of compiled sample codes).
For cuda I get message "No CUDA-capable device is detected", for OpenCL there's error from function that should find OpenCL capable units.
I have installed all three parts from Nvidia to develop with OpenCL - devdriver for win7 64bit v.301.27, cuda toolkit 4.2.9 and gpu computing sdk 4.2.9.
I think this might have to do with Optimus technology that reroutes output from Nvidia GPU to Intel to render things (this notebook has also Intel 3000HD accelerator), but in Nvidia control pannel I set to use high performance Nvidia GPU, set power profile to prefer maximum performance and for PhysX I changed from automatic selection to Nvidia processor again. Nothing has changed though, those samples won't run (not even those targeted for GF8000 cards).
I would like to play somewhat with OpenCL and see what it is capable of but without ability to test things it's useless. I have found some info about this on forums, but it was mostly about linux users where you need Bumblebee to access Nvidia GPU. There's no such problem on Windows however, drivers are better and so you can access it without dark magic (or I thought so until I found this problem).
My laptop has a GeForce 540M as well, in an Optimus configuration since my Sandy Bridge CPU also has Intel's integrated graphics. To run CUDA codes, I have to:
Install NVIDIA Driver
Go to NVIDIA Control Panel
Click 3D Settings -> Manage 3D Settings -> Global Settings
In the Preferred Graphics processor drop down, select "High-performance NVIDIA processor"
Apply the settings
Note that the instructions above apply the settings for all applications, so you don't have to worry about CUDA errors any more. But it will drain more battery.
Here is a video recap as well. Good luck!
Ok this has proven to be totally crazy solution. I was thinking if something isn't hooking between the hardware and application and only thing that came to my mind was AV software. I'm using Comodo with sandbox and Defense+ on and after turning them off I could run all those samples. What's more, only Defense+ needs to be turned off.
Now I just think about how much apps could have been blocked from accessing that GPU..
That's most likely because of the architecture of Optimus. So I'd suggest you to read
NVIDIA CUDA Developer Guide for NVIDIA Optimus Platforms, especially the section "Querying for a CUDA Device" which addresses this issue, I believe.

CUDA-enabled graphics processor as VMware?

I'm taking a course that teaches CUDA. I would like to use it my personal laptop, but I don't have Nvidia graphics processor. mine is ATI . so I was thinking is there any Virtual Hardware simulator that I can use? or that there is no other way than using a PC with CUDA Graphics processor.
Thank you very much
The CUDA toolkit used to ship with a host CPU emulation mode, but that was deprecated early in the 3.0 release cycle and has been fully removed from toolkits for the best part of two years.
Your only real option today is to use Ocelot. It has a PTX assembly translator and a pretty reliable reimplementation of the CUDA runtime for x86 CPUs, and there is also a rather experimental PTX to AMD IL translator (I have no experience with the latter). On a modern linux system with an up to date GNU toolchain, Ocelot is reasonably easy to get running. I am not sure if there is a functioning Windows port or not.
CUDA has its own emulation mode witch runs everything on CPU. Problem is that in such case you don't have real concurrency so programs that runs successfully in emulation mode can fail (and usually does) in normal mode. You can develop your code in emulation mode, but then you have to debug it on computer with CUDA card.

Emulating device firmware on ubuntu

Lets say that I have a device, such as an android phone (just for example) and I have the firmware for that device. Is there a method to emulate the entire firmware? Just like a virtual machine but for firmware that is not designed to run on normal x86 processors. I was looking into it and I think qemu might do what I need but I wanted to see if anyone had any experience with something similar.
Thanks, and sorry if its a noob question
PS, the firmware I have is designed to run on ARM processors
you need to emulate the hardware.
an operating system or firmware directly interfaces with hardware... like the display, touch screen, buttons, speakers, wireless chipset, etc.
to make the operating system work on different hardware, you either need to program it to accept the available hardware (such is more easily possible in the case of an open-source operating system like android), or provide it with simulated hardware identical to the original device.