NVidia CUDA Compiler

The NVIDIA CUDA Compiler, known as nvcc, is a key component of the CUDA Toolkit. It enables developers to write programs that can run on NVIDIA GPUs using the CUDA programming model. CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) allows developers to harness the massive parallel processing power of NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate computational tasks. The CUDA Compiler takes your C/C++ code containing CUDA extensions and compiles it into code that can be executed on both the CPU (host) and GPU (device).

File extension

The nvcc compiler is used to compile CUDA programs that typically consist of both host (CPU) and device (GPU) code. It processes CUDA source files with the .cu extension and separates them into host and device code. The host code is compiled with a standard C/C++ compiler, while the device code is compiled for execution on the GPU.

Developers use nvcc to generate executable binaries or object files which can be linked with other libraries. It also supports various compiler flags to control architecture compatibility, optimization levels, debugging, and profiling.

Check version

To check the version of the NVIDIA CUDA Compiler (nvcc), you can use the following command in your terminal or command prompt:

Example

A simple example of compiling a CUDA program using the nvcc compiler.

Suppose you have a CUDA source file called vector_add.cu. You can compile it using the following command in your terminal or command prompt:

$ nvcc vector_add.cu -o vector_add

This command compiles the CUDA code and creates an executable named vector_add.

Inside vector_add.cu, you might have CUDA kernel code like:

__global__ void add(int *a, int *b, int *c) {
 int index = threadIdx.x;
 c[index] = a[index] + b[index];
}

int main() {
 // Host and device memory allocation, data initialization,
 // kernel launch and memory cleanup would go here
}
 

 

This kernel runs on the GPU and performs element-wise addition of two arrays. The nvcc compiler compiles both the CPU-side setup code and the GPU kernel to create a complete executable.