Take the 2-minute tour ×

This question already has an answer here:

I want to setup a CUDA emulator on my ubunbu 10.04, since I don't have the hardware. Can someone provides some valuable instructions. I think Nvidia does provide an emulator, how can i set it up. so far I don't care about performance, if it's slow. Thanks.

share|improve this question
add comment

marked as duplicate by Roman C, meda, TemplateRex, David, Camilo Martin Dec 29 '13 at 21:44


4 Answers

they does not. they used to have emulation mode in CUDA v2, but still it required hardware to be installed, otherwise it will not even install. in current CUDA v3 there is no emulator, that's it. You should check the list of CUDA enabled devices and pick the cheapest. It will be not too expensive (~100$)

share|improve this answer
Actually you can install the toolkit without having a CUDA enabled device. True that you won't be able to do anything for actually running your projects, but you would be able to write and compile your code. (True as of CUDA 3.1 under Windows and Linux) –  Ian Lee Sep 21 '10 at 16:58
@Ian Lee you might be right about installing, but as far as i remember CUDA checks for CUDA compatible devise driver installed, and if you don't have device then you can't install. –  Andrey Sep 21 '10 at 17:15
The cheapest card is probably the "GeForce 8400 GS" which on newegg is selling for $39 with 512MB of Ram or $30 with 128MB. If you can spare a little, I'd get either a 1GB GTS 450 (~$120) or a 1GB GTS 460 (~$220). –  M. Tibbits Sep 24 '10 at 13:39
add comment

Direct Answer: @Andrey is correct, the new toolkit / API (v3) does not have an emulator. However, you could consider using mCUDA which compiles the kernel for a CPU target -- note that this may not help you tune your code if your ultimate target is a gpu and also, it is only currently available for Linux. I would recommend checking out gpuocelot which is a more general emulator. (Not sure if it's been tested on Windows)

Aside: This is my gripe with ATI, you can't develop with their system unless you have an ATI card installed. nVidia has no such requirement. You can absolutely download and install the toolkit and SDK. However, as @Andrey mentions, they have removed the emulator. So if you actually want to run a CUDA kernel, you do need an nVidia GPU unless you use mCUDA to compile the kernel to run on the CPU.

share|improve this answer
add comment

Try Googling for (pdf) "Analysing CUDA Workloads Using a Detailed GPU Simulator", Ali Bakhoda, (et al) Univ Brit Colombia, or their (ppt/pdf) "GPGPU-Sim: A Performance Simulator for Masively Multithreaded Processor Research".

I'm not sure if it is still active research. I just found the paper recently.

share|improve this answer
add comment

I did it with version 2.3 on my laptop with intel gpu, but I needed g++-4.3. http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=102548

I gave up trying to install g++-4.3 in newer versions of ubuntu, it wasn't funny.If you're smarter than me and know how to install g++-4.3, then you can install CUDA v2.3 EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE NVIDIA HARDWARE. I'm on an Asus laptop with Intel GPU.

This is the project for which I had it configured (in case the makefile is useful):


If you make it, I would appreciate an little guidance on how to install g++-4.3 in a debian/ubuntu with a newer compiler without breaking everything. ;)

share|improve this answer
add comment
