Using libraries like boost in cuda device code

Question

I am learning cuda at the moment and I am wondering if it is possible to use functions from different libraries and api's like boost in cuda device code. Note: I tried using std::cout and that did not work I got printf working after changing the code generation to compute_20,sm_20. I'm using Visual Studio 2010. Cuda 5.0. GPU Nvidia GTX 570. NSIght is installed.

Answer 1

Here's an answer. And here's the CUDA documentation about language support. Boost won't make it for sure.

Since the purpose of using CUDA is to speed up kernels in your code, you'll typically want to limit the language complexities used, because of adding overhead. This will mean that you'll typically stay very close to plain C, with just a few sprinkles of C++ if that's really handy.

Constructs in for example Boost can result in large amounts of assembly code (and C++ in general has been criticised for this and is a reason to not use certain constructs in real-time software). This is all fine for most applications, but not for kernels you'll want to run on a GPU, where every instruction counts.

For CUDA (or OpenCL), people typically write intense algorithms that work on data in arrays. For example special image processing. You only use these techniques to do the calculation intensive tasks of you application. Then you have a 'regular' program that interacts with the user/network/database which creates these CUDA tasks (i.e. selects the data and parameters) and gives starts them. Here are CUDA samples.