dorsal team mailing list archive

["Garth N. Wells" <gnw20@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 23 November 2011 12:57, Fredrik Heffer Valdmanis <fredva@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi,
> As part of my master's, I am extending Dolfin to make use of PETSc's CUDA
> support. My work will hopefully be merged into Dolfin 1.1, and it would be
> nice to have Dorsal build PETSc 3.2 with support for CUDA.
> I have branched Dorsal and tried to implement this. It fetches a few extra
> packages, but I am not sure if it can (or should) fetch and build the CUDA
> toolkit. Right now, the user must install the CUDA toolkit manually, then
> modify the chosen platform file to contain the variable CUDA_DIR, and add
> "cusp" and "thrust" packages to the list. This kind of manual configuration
> by the user is of course not optimal, does anyone have any input on how this
> can be done better?

I'd suggest waiting on this with Dorsal. My experience is that it's
more complicated than above. e.g. CUDA relies on an appropriate Nvidia
driver being installed, older gcc versions than what are default on
up-to-date distributions are required, and this requires some symbolic
links and tweaking of environment variables, and some cards don't
support double precision which complicates PETSc installation.

> If we could detect the presence of the CUDA compiler (nvcc) on the user's
> path and check that it meets the minimum version requirement, could we then
> set CUDA_DIR and add cusp and thrust to the list of packages automatically?
> My branch is at lp:~fredva/dorsal/dorsal-gpu. The changes are in {petsc,
> cusp, thrust}.package.
> It's stil a long time before Dolfin 1.1, so there is no rush getting this
> into Dorsal. It would be nice for developers wanting to test the GPU code
> though.

I have a simple a DOLFIN/CMake build system which detects nvcc and
CUSP. I can add it later.

Garth

> --
> Fredrik
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