Is it possible to reset or restart the GPU

Question

I am doing some programming with cuda. I screw up with the GPU memory somehow and the following is what I see on my screen, which is driving me crazy!! Have anybody ever came across a similar problem before. Is there a way to fix the problem other than restarting the computer?

As I am debugging, I don't want to restart my computer ever single time I launch the program. I will appreciate whatever advice you can provide.

By the way, the black and white dots are flashing like stars! And that's making me very dizzy!!

Answer 1

In general, under windows, there is no mechanism for ordinary user access to reset or restart of the GPU.

However if you have not modified the windows vista/7/8 TDR mechanism on your machine, you may be able to take advantage of it in this case to force a GPU reset by the OS.

You should be able to write a CUDA program that spins forever (e.g. a while loop that never exits). Compile it to an executable. Make a shortcut to that executable on your desktop. Whenever your display gets corrupted like this, try running that executable. It should cause the display to freeze, which will trigger the Windows TDR mechanism, which will cause a GPU reset and driver reload.

Answer 2

I had a similar problem under Linux today. As I couldn't find a way to do it properly without terminating my current graphical session, I just put my computer to sleep and restarted. It worked, and should probably work the same regardless of the operating system.