How to emulate CUDA on windows

Question

is there any way I can test the CUDA samples and codes from a computer with no NVIDIA graphic card? I am using Windows and the latest version of CUDA.

Answer 1

There are several possibilities:

1. Use older version of CUDA, which has built-in emulator (2.3 has it for sure). Emulator is far from good, and you won't have features from latest CUDA releases.
2. Use OpenCL, it can run on CPUs (though not with nVidia SDK, you will have to install either AMD or Intel OpenCL implementation (AMD works fine on Intel CPUs, btw)). In my experience, OpenCL is usually slightly slower than CUDA.
3. There is windows branch of Ocelot emulator: http://code.google.com/p/gpuocelot/. I haven't tried it, though.

However, I would recommend buying some CUDA-capable card. 8xxx or 9xxx series is ok and really cheap. Emulation would allow you to get some basic skills of GPGPU programming, but is useless when you write some real-world application since it doesn't allow you to debug and tune performance.