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Tesla Compute Cluster (TCC)

NVIDIA® Nsight™ Development Platform, Visual Studio Edition 4.7 User Guide
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For most GPUs, you do not have to do anything specific in NVIDIA Nsight to enable debugging on a Tesla Compute Cluster (TCC) device. You don't have to modify your Visual Studio project or enable any specific setting. The TCC device simply shows up as a standard CUDA device. For some Tesla-based GPUs, the default mode is not TCC. See below for more information.

Do not kill a process that is executing code on a TCC device and paused on a breakpoint, except through the normal Stop Debugging command (SHIFT+F5) in Visual Studio. Abnormal termination of a target application that is paused during a debugging session on a TCC device results in unpredictable behavior. It causes future calls to cuCtxInit() to hang indefinitely, even though the killed process seems to terminate normally. The only way to recover is to reboot the target machine. See the latest release notes to learn about any changes in this behavior.

Limitations

There are 2 main limitations you will encounter when debugging code running on a TCC device:

There is no OpenGL or D3D interop support.

You cannot have a display connected to an adapter when the underlying device is running in TCC mode. Physically connecting a display causes unpredictable behavior. Windows detects the TCC adapter as a "Standard VGA" device (which it is not), connected to the existing NVIDIA device. The unpredictable behavior results in having to reboot the entire system.

Setting TCC Mode for Tesla Products

The following table shows the default TCC/non-TCC mode for supported Tesla products:

Tesla Product	Default Mode
C1060	TCC
C2050	non-TCC
C2070	non-TCC
S870	TCC
S2050	TCC
S1070	TCC
M1060	TCC
M2050	TCC
M2070	TCC
M2070-Q	non-TCC

To change the TCC mode, use the NVIDIA SMI utility. This is located by default at C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\NVSMI. Use the following syntax to change the TCC mode:

nvidia-smi -g {GPU_ID} -dm {0|1}

0 = WDDM

1 = TCC

About TCC

The TCC (Tesla Compute Cluster) driver is a Windows driver that supports CUDA C/C++ applications. The driver enables remote desktop services, and reduces the CUDA kernel launch overhead on Windows. Note that the TCC driver disables graphics on the Tesla products.

The main purpose of TCC and the Tesla products is to aid applications that use CUDA to perform simulations, and large scale calculations (especially floating-point calculations), such as image generation for professional use and scientific fields of study.

The benefits of using the Tesla Compute Cluster driver package:

TCC drivers make it possible to use NVIDIA GPUs in nodes with non‐NVIDIA integrated graphics.
NVIDIA GPUs on systems running the TCC drivers will be available via Remote Desktop, both directly and via cluster management systems that rely on Remote Desktop.
NVIDIA GPUs will be available to applications running as a Windows service (in Session 0) on systems running the TCC drivers.

The TCC driver was specifically designed to be used with Microsoft's Windows HPC Server 2008. However, NVIDIA's TCC driver can be used with operating systems other than Windows HPC Server 2008. The NVIDIA TCC driver does not have the same pinned allocation limits or memory fragmentation behavior as WDDM. You can mix TCC drivers with XP-style display drivers.

For more information about supported operating systems, and compatibility with other NVIDIA drivers, refer to the documentation on NVIDIA Tesla:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla_computing_solutions.html

For more information about NVIDIA hardware compatibility on Windows HPC Server 2008, see:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff793340(WS.10).aspx

To search the NVIDIA web site for Tesla drivers, see:

http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx