best way of using cuda

Question

There are ways of using cuda:

1. auto-paralleing tools such as PGI workstation;
2. wrapper such as Thrust(in STL style)
3. NVidia GPUSDK(runtime/driver API)

Which one is better for performance or learning curve or other factors? Any suggestion?

Answer 1

Go with the traditional CUDA SDK, for both performance and smaller learning curve.

CUDA exposes several types of memory (global, shared, texture) which have a dramatic impact on the performance of your application, there are great articles about it on the web.

This page is very interesting and mentions the great series of articles about CUDA on Dr. Dobb's.

Answer 2

I believe that the NVIDIA GPU SDK is the best, with a few caveats. For example, try to avoid using the cutil.h functions, as these were written solely for use with the SDK, and I've personally, as well as many others, have run into some problems and bugs in them, that are hard to fix (There also is no documentation for this "library" and I've heard that NVIDIA does not support it at all)

Instead, as you mentioned, use the one of the two provided APIs. In particular I recommend the Runtime API, as it is a higher level API, and so you don't have to worry quite as much about all of the low level implementation details as you do in the Device API.

Both APIs are fully documented in the CUDA Programming Guide and CUDA Reference Guide, both of which are updated and provided with each CUDA release.