Crate cudarc

Safe abstractions over:

1. CUDA driver API
2. NVRTC API
3. cuRAND API
4. cuBLAS API

crate organization

Each of the modules for the above is organized into three levels:

1. A safe module which provides safe abstractions over the result module
2. A result which is a thin wrapper around the sys module to ensure all functions return Result
3. A sys module which contains the raw FFI bindings

API	Safe	Result	Sys
driver	driver::safe	driver::result	driver::sys
cublas	cublas::safe	cublas::result	cublas::sys
nvrtc	nvrtc::safe	nvrtc::result	nvrtc::sys
curand	curand::safe	curand::result	curand::sys
cudnn	-	cudnn::result	cudnn::sys

Core Concepts

At the core is the driver API, which exposes a bunch of structs, but the main ones are:

1. driver::CudaDevice is a handle to a specific device ordinal (e.g. 0, 1, 2, …)
2. driver::CudaSlice<T>, which represents a Vec<T> on the device, can be allocated using the aforementioned CudaDevice.

Here is a table of similar concepts between CPU and Cuda:

Concept	CPU	Cuda
Memory allocator	std::alloc::GlobalAlloc	driver::CudaDevice
List of values on heap	Vec<T>	driver::CudaSlice<T>
Slice	&[T]	driver::CudaView<T>
Mutable Slice	&mut [T]	driver::CudaViewMut<T>
Function	Fn	driver::CudaFunction
Calling a function	my_function(a, b, c)	driver::LaunchAsync::launch()
Thread	std::thread::Thread	driver::CudaStream

Combining the different APIs

All the highest level apis have been designed to work together.

nvrtc

nvrtc::compile_ptx() outputs a nvrtc::Ptx, which can be loaded into a device with driver::CudaDevice::load_ptx().

cublas

cublas::CudaBlas can perform gemm operations using cublas::Gemm<T>, and cublas::Gemv<T>. Both of these traits can generically accept memory allocated by the driver in the form of: driver::CudaSlice<T>, driver::CudaView<T>, and driver::CudaViewMut<T>.

curand

curand::CudaRng can fill a driver::CudaSlice<T> with random data, based on one of its available distributions.

Combining safe/result/sys

The result and sys levels are very inter-changeable for each API. However, the safe apis don’t necessarily allow you to mix in the result level. This is to encourage going through the safe API when possible.

If you need some functionality that isn’t present in the safe api, please open a ticket.

Modules

• cublas
  Wrappers around the cublas API, in three levels. See crate documentation for description of each.
• cudnn
• curand
  Wrappers around the cuRAND API in three levels. See crate documentation for description of each.
• driver
  Wrappers around the CUDA driver API, in three levels. See crate documentation for description of each.
• nvrtc
  Wrappers around the Nvidia Runtime Compilation (nvrtc) API, in three levels. See crate documentation for description of each.
• types
  Exposes CudaTypeName which maps between rust type names and the corresponding cuda kernel type names.