Parallel Nsight Part 1: Configuring and Debugging Applications

This is the first of a two-part article that focuses on how to use NVIDIA's highly anticipated Visual Studio based Parallel Nsight debugging and profiling environment for Microsoft Windows to create and profile applications. Specifically, this article discusses the thinking behind Parallel Nsight; how to install and configure the software; plus walk through the steps to create a CUDA project from scratch and debug it. The example code from Part 14 that was used to demonstrate cuda-gdb will be built with Visual Studio and debugged with Parallel Nsight. The next article uses the Parallel Nsight 1.0 analysis capabilities to compare the Part 18 primitive restart OpenGL example with more conventional OpenGL rendering methods.

Regular readers of this series will note that the use of Visual Studio represents a departure from the previous articles in this tutorial series, which utilized the Linux tool chain to edit and create CUDA applications. With the release of Parallel Nsight, NVIDIA has made a commitment to the debugging and profiling needs of a huge base of Microsoft Windows developers ranging from game developers to commercial High Performance Computing (HPC) users. In addition to CUDA, Parallel Nsight also provides developers the ability to analyze and debug HLSL textures plus OpenCL application tracing is also supported. All the features discussed in this article are part of the standard version that is available without charge. The analysis features require the professional version, which must be purchased