Simulation / Modeling / Design

CUDACasts Episode 14: Racecheck Analysis with CUDA 5.5

The key to the power of GPUs is their 1000’s of parallel processors that execute threads. Anyone who has worked with even a handful of threads know how easy it can be to introduce race conditions, and how difficult it  can be to debug and fix these errors. Because a modern GPU can have thousands of simultaneously executing threads, NVIDIA engineers felt it was imperative to create an incredibly powerful tool for detecting and debugging race conditions.

This racecheck tool comes as part of the cuda-memcheck command-line utility. In CUDA 5.5 a new racecheck analysis mode presents much more human-readable analysis of your code, even reporting which source lines conflict with other lines. In this episode of CUDACasts we use a simple version of Conway’s Game of Life to show the new racecheck features cuda-memcheck. We’ll start with a few race condition bugs, and then use the analysis tool to find and fix them.

To suggest a topic for a future episode of CUDACasts, or if you have any other feedback, please leave a comment below.

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