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Quick Start Guide

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sdalton1 edited this page Aug 24, 2012 · 1 revision

#summary Guide for new Cusp developers <wiki:toc max_depth="2" />

Introduction

This page describes how to develop CUDA applications with CUSP, a C++ template library for sparse matrix computations. This guide is intended to be accessible, even to developers with limited C++ experience.

Prerequisites

Cusp v0.3.0 requires CUDA 4.1 (or newer). You can confirm that CUDA 4.1 is installed by running nvcc --version on the command line. For example on a Linux system,

$ nvcc --version
nvcc: NVIDIA (R) Cuda compiler driver
Copyright (c) 2005-2011 NVIDIA Corporation
Built on Thu_Jan_12_14:41:45_PST_2012
Cuda compilation tools, release 4.1, V0.2.1221

outputs the compiler version information.

Since Cusp is a C++ template library there is nothing to "build". Simply download the newest version of Cusp from here and extract the contents of each zip file to a directory. We suggest installing Cusp to the CUDA include directory, which is usually

  • /usr/local/cuda/include/ on a Linux and Mac OSX
  • C:\CUDA\include\ on a Windows system

If you are unable to install to the CUDA include directory, then you can place the files somewhere in your home directory, for example: /home/nathan/cuda_libraries/cusp/.

Warning: Do not install Cusp to a standard include path like /usr/local/include/. It appears that nvcc treats such paths differently than the suggestions above which causes errors like error: expected primary-expression before ‘<’ token.

Simple Example

Let's compile a simple program to make sure all the prerequisites are satisfied. Save the following source code to a file named version.cu.

#include <thrust/version.h>
#include <cusp/version.h>
#include <iostream>

int main(void)
{
    int cuda_major =  CUDA_VERSION / 1000;
    int cuda_minor = (CUDA_VERSION % 1000) / 10;

    int thrust_major = THRUST_MAJOR_VERSION;
    int thrust_minor = THRUST_MINOR_VERSION;

    int cusp_major = CUSP_MAJOR_VERSION;
    int cusp_minor = CUSP_MINOR_VERSION;

    std::cout << "CUDA   v" << cuda_major   << "." << cuda_minor   << std::endl;
    std::cout << "Thrust v" << thrust_major << "." << thrust_minor << std::endl;
    std::cout << "Cusp   v" << cusp_major   << "." << cusp_minor   << std::endl;

    return 0;
}

Note: Thrust is now distributed with the CUDA Toolkit, so it is automatically installed to the standard CUDA include path.

Now compile version.cu with nvcc. If Cusp was installed to the CUDA include directory then the following commands should work.

$ nvcc version.cu -o version
$ ls
thrust  version version.cu
$ ./version
CUDA   v4.1
Thrust v1.5
Cusp   v0.3

If the cusp directory is placed somewhere else, use the -I option to tell nvcc where to look. For example, if cusp was placed in /home/nathan/cuda_libraries/ then the following command should be used.

$ nvcc version.cu -o version -I /home/nathan/cuda_libraries/

Other Examples

Additional Cusp examples are available for download or online browsing. These examples can be compiled using the same procedure as above. For instance, the Conjugate Gradient solver example is compiled and run as follows:

$ cd examples/Solvers/
$ nvcc -O2 cg.cu -o cg
$ ./cg
Solver will continue until residual norm 0.01 or reaching 100 iterations 
Iteration Number  | Residual Norm
            0       1.000000e+01
            1       1.414214e+01
            2       1.093707e+01
            3       8.949319e+00
            4       6.190055e+00
            5       3.835189e+00
            6       1.745481e+00
            7       5.963546e-01
            8       2.371134e-01
            9       1.152524e-01
           10       3.134467e-02
           11       1.144415e-02
           12       1.824176e-03
Successfully converged after 12 iterations.

Sparse Matrices

Cusp natively supports several sparse matrix formats:

When manipulating matrices it's important to understand the advantages and disadvantages of each format. Broadly speaking, the DIA and ELL formats are the most efficient for computing sparse matrix-vector products, and therefore are the fastest formats for solving sparse linear systems with iterative methods (e.g. Conjugate Gradients). The COO and CSR formats are more flexible than DIA and ELL and easier manipulate. The HYB format is a hybrid combination of the ELL (fast) and COO (flexible) formats and is a good default choice. Refer to the matrix format examples for additional information.

Format Conversions

Cusp makes it easy to transfer data between the host and device and convert between sparse matrix formats. For example,

cusp::csr_matrix<int,float,cusp::host_memory> A(5,8,12);

allocates storage for a CSR matrix on the host with 5 rows, 8 columns, and 12 nonzero values. After initializing the entries of the matrix, we can copy it to the device with a single line of code,

cusp::csr_matrix<int,float,cusp::device_memory> B = A;

or transparently convert it to another format,

cusp::hyb_matrix<int,float,cusp::device_memory> C = A;

before copying it to the device.

Dense Arrays

Cusp provides one and two-dimensional dense arrays.

File I/O

Cusp provides support for reading and writing MatrixMarket files. Refer to the documentation and examples for usage information.

Algorithms

  • cusp::multiply - common interface for sparse matrix-vector multiplication
  • cusp::transpose - common interface for computing matrix transposes

Iterative Solvers

Cusp provides a variety of iterative methods] for solving sparse linear systems. Established [subspace](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krylov_subspace Krylov) methods are available:

Monitors

Monitors determine the solver convergence criteria (i.e. when to stop iterating) and report information about the iteration. Users can provide their own monitors to implement specialized convergence criteria or record information during the course of iteration. The built-in monitors provided by Cusp are:

Preconditioners

Preconditioners are a way to improve the rate of convergence of iterative solvers. The good preconditioner is fast to compute and approximates the inverse of the matrix in some sense. Cusp provides the following preconditioners:

User-Defined Linear Operators

Sometimes it is useful to solve a linear system A*x = b without converting the matrix A into one of Cusp's formats. For this reason Cusp supports user-defined linear operators that take in a vector x and compute the result y = A * x. These black-box operators can be used to interface matrix-free methods with Cusp's iterative solvers.

  • cusp::linear_operator - interface for user-defined linear operators

Utilities

  • cusp::gallery::* - routines for generating matrix examples
  • cusp::blas::* - collection of level-1 BLAS routines used by iterative solvers
  • cusp::print - basic support for printing matrix contents
  • cusp::is_valid_matrix - check validity of matrix format

Additional Resources

This guide only scratches the surface of what you can do with Cusp. The following resources can help you learn to do more with Thrust or provide assistance when problems arise.

We strongly encourage users to subscribe to the cusp-users mailing list. The mailing list is a great place to seek out help from the Cusp developers and other Cusp users.

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