CUDA Toolkit Documentation - v10.0.130 (older) - Last updated August 25, 2018 - Send Feedback

# CUDA Toolkit Documentation v10.0.130

Release Notes
  The Release Notes for the CUDA Toolkit.
EULA
  The End User License Agreements for the NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit, the NVIDIA CUDA Samples, the NVIDIA Display Driver, and NVIDIA NSight (Visual Studio Edition).

## Installation Guides

Quick Start Guide
  This guide provides the minimal first-steps instructions for installation and verifying CUDA on a standard system.
Installation Guide Windows
  This guide discusses how to install and check for correct operation of the CUDA Development Tools on Microsoft Windows systems.
Installation Guide Mac OS X
  This guide discusses how to install and check for correct operation of the CUDA Development Tools on Mac OS X systems.
Installation Guide Linux
  This guide discusses how to install and check for correct operation of the CUDA Development Tools on GNU/Linux systems.

## Programming Guides

Programming Guide
  This guide provides a detailed discussion of the CUDA programming model and programming interface. It then describes the hardware implementation, and provides guidance on how to achieve maximum performance. The appendices include a list of all CUDA-enabled devices, detailed description of all extensions to the C language, listings of supported mathematical functions, C++ features supported in host and device code, details on texture fetching, technical specifications of various devices, and concludes by introducing the low-level driver API.
Best Practices Guide
  This guide presents established parallelization and optimization techniques and explains coding metaphors and idioms that can greatly simplify programming for CUDA-capable GPU architectures. The intent is to provide guidelines for obtaining the best performance from NVIDIA GPUs using the CUDA Toolkit.
Maxwell Compatibility Guide
  This application note is intended to help developers ensure that their NVIDIA CUDA applications will run properly on GPUs based on the NVIDIA Maxwell Architecture. This document provides guidance to ensure that your software applications are compatible with Maxwell.
Pascal Compatibility Guide
  This application note is intended to help developers ensure that their NVIDIA CUDA applications will run properly on GPUs based on the NVIDIA Pascal Architecture. This document provides guidance to ensure that your software applications are compatible with Pascal.
Volta Compatibility Guide
  This application note is intended to help developers ensure that their NVIDIA CUDA applications will run properly on GPUs based on the NVIDIA Volta Architecture. This document provides guidance to ensure that your software applications are compatible with Volta.
Turing Compatibility Guide
  This application note is intended to help developers ensure that their NVIDIA CUDA applications will run properly on GPUs based on the NVIDIA Turing Architecture. This document provides guidance to ensure that your software applications are compatible with Turing.
Kepler Tuning Guide
  Kepler is NVIDIA's 3rd-generation architecture for CUDA compute applications. Applications that follow the best practices for the Fermi architecture should typically see speedups on the Kepler architecture without any code changes. This guide summarizes the ways that applications can be fine-tuned to gain additional speedups by leveraging Kepler architectural features.
Maxwell Tuning Guide
  Maxwell is NVIDIA's 4th-generation architecture for CUDA compute applications. Applications that follow the best practices for the Kepler architecture should typically see speedups on the Maxwell architecture without any code changes. This guide summarizes the ways that applications can be fine-tuned to gain additional speedups by leveraging Maxwell architectural features.
Pascal Tuning Guide
  Pascal is NVIDIA's 5th-generation architecture for CUDA compute applications. Applications that follow the best practices for the Maxwell architecture should typically see speedups on the Pascal architecture without any code changes. This guide summarizes the ways that applications can be fine-tuned to gain additional speedups by leveraging Pascal architectural features.
Volta Tuning Guide
  Volta is NVIDIA's 6th-generation architecture for CUDA compute applications. Applications that follow the best practices for the Pascal architecture should typically see speedups on the Volta architecture without any code changes. This guide summarizes the ways that applications can be fine-tuned to gain additional speedups by leveraging Volta architectural features.
Turing Tuning Guide
  Turing is NVIDIA's 7th-generation architecture for CUDA compute applications. Applications that follow the best practices for the Pascal architecture should typically see speedups on the Turing architecture without any code changes. This guide summarizes the ways that applications can be fine-tuned to gain additional speedups by leveraging Turing architectural features.
PTX ISA
  This guide provides detailed instructions on the use of PTX, a low-level parallel thread execution virtual machine and instruction set architecture (ISA). PTX exposes the GPU as a data-parallel computing device.
Developer Guide for Optimus
  This document explains how CUDA APIs can be used to query for GPU capabilities in NVIDIA Optimus systems.
Video Decoder
  NVIDIA Video Decoder (NVCUVID) is deprecated. Instead, use the NVIDIA Video Codec SDK (https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-video-codec-sdk).
PTX Interoperability
  This document shows how to write PTX that is ABI-compliant and interoperable with other CUDA code.
Inline PTX Assembly
  This document shows how to inline PTX (parallel thread execution) assembly language statements into CUDA code. It describes available assembler statement parameters and constraints, and the document also provides a list of some pitfalls that you may encounter.

## CUDA API References

CUDA Runtime API
  The CUDA runtime API.
CUDA Driver API
  The CUDA driver API.
CUDA Math API
  The CUDA math API.
cuBLAS
  The cuBLAS library is an implementation of BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) on top of the NVIDIA CUDA runtime. It allows the user to access the computational resources of NVIDIA Graphical Processing Unit (GPU), but does not auto-parallelize across multiple GPUs.
NVBLAS
  The NVBLAS library is a multi-GPUs accelerated drop-in BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) built on top of the NVIDIA cuBLAS Library.
nvJPEG
  The nvJPEG Library provides high-performance GPU accelerated JPEG decoding functionality for image formats commonly used in deep learning and hyperscale multimedia applications.
cuFFT
  The cuFFT library user guide.
nvGRAPH
  The nvGRAPH library user guide.
cuRAND
  The cuRAND library user guide.
cuSPARSE
  The cuSPARSE library user guide.
NPP
  NVIDIA NPP is a library of functions for performing CUDA accelerated processing. The initial set of functionality in the library focuses on imaging and video processing and is widely applicable for developers in these areas. NPP will evolve over time to encompass more of the compute heavy tasks in a variety of problem domains. The NPP library is written to maximize flexibility, while maintaining high performance.
NVRTC (Runtime Compilation)
  NVRTC is a runtime compilation library for CUDA C++. It accepts CUDA C++ source code in character string form and creates handles that can be used to obtain the PTX. The PTX string generated by NVRTC can be loaded by cuModuleLoadData and cuModuleLoadDataEx, and linked with other modules by cuLinkAddData of the CUDA Driver API. This facility can often provide optimizations and performance not possible in a purely offline static compilation.
Thrust
  The Thrust getting started guide.
cuSOLVER
  The cuSOLVER library user guide.

## Miscellaneous

CUDA Samples
  This document contains a complete listing of the code samples that are included with the NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit. It describes each code sample, lists the minimum GPU specification, and provides links to the source code and white papers if available.
CUDA Demo Suite
  This document describes the demo applications shipped with the CUDA Demo Suite.
CUPTI
  The CUPTI API.
Debugger API
  The CUDA debugger API.
GPUDirect RDMA
  A technology introduced in Kepler-class GPUs and CUDA 5.0, enabling a direct path for communication between the GPU and a third-party peer device on the PCI Express bus when the devices share the same upstream root complex using standard features of PCI Express. This document introduces the technology and describes the steps necessary to enable a GPUDirect RDMA connection to NVIDIA GPUs within the Linux device driver model.
vGPU
  vGPUs that support CUDA.

## Tools

NVCC
  This document is a reference guide on the use of nvcc, the CUDA compiler driver. nvcc accepts a range of conventional compiler options, such as for defining macros and include/library paths, and for steering the compilation process.
CUDA-GDB
  The NVIDIA tool for debugging CUDA applications running on Linux and Mac, providing developers with a mechanism for debugging CUDA applications running on actual hardware. CUDA-GDB is an extension to the x86-64 port of GDB, the GNU Project debugger.
CUDA-MEMCHECK
  CUDA-MEMCHECK is a suite of run time tools capable of precisely detecting out of bounds and misaligned memory access errors, checking device allocation leaks, reporting hardware errors and identifying shared memory data access hazards.
Nsight Eclipse Edition
  Nsight Eclipse Edition getting started guide
Nsight Eclipse Plugins Installation Guide
  Nsight Eclipse Plugins Installation Guide
Nsight Eclipse Plugins Edition
  Nsight Eclipse Plugins Edition getting started guide
Profiler
  This is the guide to the Profiler.
CUDA Binary Utilities
  The application notes for cuobjdump, nvdisasm, and nvprune.
GPU Library Advisor
  The application notes for NVIDIA GPU Library Advisor.

## White Papers

Floating Point and IEEE 754
  A number of issues related to floating point accuracy and compliance are a frequent source of confusion on both CPUs and GPUs. The purpose of this white paper is to discuss the most common issues related to NVIDIA GPUs and to supplement the documentation in the CUDA C Programming Guide.
Incomplete-LU and Cholesky Preconditioned Iterative Methods
  In this white paper we show how to use the cuSPARSE and cuBLAS libraries to achieve a 2x speedup over CPU in the incomplete-LU and Cholesky preconditioned iterative methods. We focus on the Bi-Conjugate Gradient Stabilized and Conjugate Gradient iterative methods, that can be used to solve large sparse nonsymmetric and symmetric positive definite linear systems, respectively. Also, we comment on the parallel sparse triangular solve, which is an essential building block in these algorithms.

## Compiler SDK

libNVVM API
  The libNVVM API.
libdevice User's Guide
  The libdevice library is an LLVM bitcode library that implements common functions for GPU kernels.
NVVM IR
  NVVM IR is a compiler IR (internal representation) based on the LLVM IR. The NVVM IR is designed to represent GPU compute kernels (for example, CUDA kernels). High-level language front-ends, like the CUDA C compiler front-end, can generate NVVM IR.