By Rob Farber
In CUDA, Supercomputing for the Masses Part 18, Rob demonstrated how to achieve very high rendering and compute performance by mixing CUDA and OpenGL in the same program and through the use of primitive restart, an OpenGL extension CUDA programmers can exploit to bypass PCIe bottlenecks to increase rendering performance by nearly 100 frames per second. 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.

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