CUDA Demo Suite

The reference guide for the CUDA Demo Suite.

1. Introduction

The CUDA Demo Suite contains pre-built applications which use CUDA. These applications demonstrate the capabilities and details of NVIDIA GPUs.

2. Demos

Below are the demos within the demo suite.

2.1. deviceQuery

This application enumerates the properties of the CUDA devices present in the system and displays them in a human readable format.

2.2. vectorAdd

This application is a very basic demo that implements element by element vector addition.

2.3. bandwidthTest

This application provides the memcopy bandwidth of the GPU and memcpy bandwidth across PCI‑e. This application is capable of measuring device to device copy bandwidth, host to device copy bandwidth for pageable and page-locked memory, and device to host copy bandwidth for pageable and page-locked memory.

Arguments:

Usage:  bandwidthTest [OPTION]...
Test the bandwidth for device to host, host to device, and device to device transfers

Example:  measure the bandwidth of device to host pinned memory copies in the range 1024 Bytes to 102400 Bytes in 1024 Byte increments
./bandwidthTest --memory=pinned --mode=range --start=1024 --end=102400 --increment=1024 --dtoh

Options

Explanation

–help

Display this help menu

–csv

Print results as a CSV

–device=[deviceno]

all

0,1,2,…,n

Specify the device device to be used

compute cumulative bandwidth on all the devices

Specify any particular device to be used

–memory=[MEMMODE]

pageable

pinned

Specify which memory mode to use

pageable memory

non-pageable system memory

–mode=[MODE]

quick

range

shmoo

Specify the mode to use

performs a quick measurement

measures a user-specified range of values

performs an intense shmoo of a large range of values

–htod

Measure host to device transfers

–dtoh

Measure device to host transfers

–dtod

Measure device to device transfers

–wc

Allocate pinned memory as write-combined

–cputiming

Force CPU-based timing always

Range Mode options

–start=[SIZE]

–end=[SIZE]

–increment=[SIZE]]


Starting transfer size in bytes

Ending transfer size in bytes

Increment size in bytes

2.4. busGrind

Provides detailed statistics about peer-to-peer memory bandwidth amongst GPUs present in the system as well as pinned, unpinned memory bandwidth.

Arguments:

Options

Explanation

-h

print usage

-p [0,1]

enable or disable pinned memory tests (default on)

-u [0,1]

enable or disable unpinned memory tests (default off)

-e [0,1]

enable or disable p2p enabled memory tests (default off)

-d [0,1]

enable or disable p2p disabled memory tests (default off)

-a

enable all tests

-n

disable all tests

Order of parameters matters.
Examples:
    ./BusGrind -n -p 1 -e 1   Run all pinned and P2P tests
    ./BusGrind -n -u 1        Runs only unpinned tests
    ./BusGrind -a             Runs all tests (pinned, unpinned, p2p enabled, p2p disabled)

2.5. nbody

This demo does an efficient all-pairs simulation of a gravitational n-body simulation in CUDA. It scales the n-body simulation across multiple GPUs in a single PC if available. Adding “-numbodies=num_of_bodies” to the command line will allow users to set # of bodies for simulation. Adding “-numdevices=N” to the command line option will cause the sample to use N devices (if available) for simulation. In this mode, the position and velocity data for all bodies are read from system memory using “zero copy” rather than from device memory. For a small number of devices (4 or fewer) and a large enough number of bodies, bandwidth is not a bottleneck so we can achieve strong scaling across these devices.

Arguments:

Options

Explanation

-fullscreen

run n-body simulation in fullscreen mode

-fp64

use double precision floating point values for simulation

-hostmem

stores simulation data in host memory

-benchmark

run benchmark to measure performance

-numbodies=N

number of bodies (>= 1) to run in simulation

-device=d

where d=0,1,2…. for the CUDA device to use

-numdevices=i

where i=(number of CUDA devices > 0) to use for simulation

-compare

compares simulation results running once on the default GPU and once on the CPU

-cpu

run n-body simulation on the CPU

-tipsy=file.bin

load a tipsy model file for simulation

2.6. oceanFFT

This is a graphical demo which simulates an ocean height field using the CUFFT library, and renders the result using OpenGL.

The following keys can be used to control the output:

Keys

Function

w

Toggle wireframe

2.7. randomFog

This is a graphical demo which does pseudo- and quasi- random numbers visualization produced by CURAND. On creation, randomFog generates 200,000 random coordinates in spherical coordinate space (radius, angle rho, angle theta) with curand’s XORWOW algorithm. The coordinates are normalized for a uniform distribution through the sphere. The X axis is drawn with blue in the negative direction and yellow positive. The Y axis is drawn with green in the negative direction and magenta positive. The Z axis is drawn with red in the negative direction and cyan positive.

The following keys can be used to control the output:

Keys

Function

s

Generate new set of random nos and display as spherical coordinates (Sphere)

e

Generate new set of random nos and display on a spherical surface (shEll)

b

Generate new set of random nos and display as cartesian coordinates (cuBe/Box)

p

Generate new set of random nos and display on a cartesian plane (Plane)

i, l, j

Rotate the negative Z-axis up, right, down and left respectively

a

Toggle auto-rotation

t

Toggle 10x zoom

z

Toggle axes display

x

Select XORWOW generator (default)

c

Select Sobol’ generator

v

Select scrambled Sobol’ generator

r

Reset XORWOW (i.e. reset to initial seed) and regenerate

]

Increment the number of Sobol’ dimensions and regenerate

[

Reset the number of Sobol’ dimensions to 1 and regenerate

Increment the number of displayed points by 8,000 (max. 200,000)

Decrement the number of displayed points by 8,000 (down to min. 8000)

q/[ESC]

Quit the application.

3. Notices

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3.2. OpenCL

OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc. used under license to the Khronos Group Inc.

3.3. Trademarks

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