GPU Emulator for CUDA programming without the hardware

Question

Question: Is there an emulator for a Geforce card that would allow me to program and test CUDA without having the actual hardware?

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Info:

I'm looking to speed up a few simulations of mine in CUDA, but my problem is that I'm not always around my desktop for doing this development. I would like to do some work on my netbook instead, but my netbook doesn't have a GPU. Now as far as I know, you need a CUDA capable GPU to run CUDA. Is there a way to get around this? It would seem like the only way is a GPU emulator (which obviously would be painfully slow, but would work). But whatever way there is to do this I would like to hear.

I'm programming on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

Answer 1

The cuda framework has one built into it: make sure to use -deviceemu when compiling with nvcc :-)

Answer 2

You can check also gpuocelot project which is a true emulator in the sense that PTX (bytecode in which CUDA code is converted to) will be emulated.

There's also an LLVM translator, it would be interesting to test if it's more fast than when using -deviceemu.

Answer 3

Be careful when you're programming using -deviceemu as there are operations that nvcc will accept while in emulation mode but not when actually running on a GPU. This is mostly found with device-host interaction.

And as you mentioned, prepare for some slow execution.

Answer 4

I have another Problem in getting my first CUDA-Project started:

Stating the Fact, that i don't have a CUDA-Capable GPU in my PC I am developing from, I of course have no possibility to install the CUDA-Drivers, which causes a CudaSafeCall() Runtime API-Error concerning missing Drivers.

What options do i have to install the needed Drivers anyway?