Home

ManagedCuda provides an intuitive access to the Cuda driver API for any .net language. It is kind of an equivalent to the runtime API (= a comfortable wrapper of the driver API for C/C++) but written entirely in C# for .net. In contrast to the runtime API, managedCUDA takes a different approach to represent CUDA specifics: managedCuda is object oriented. In general you can find C# classes for each Cuda handle in the driver API. For example, instead of a handle CUContext, managedCUDA provides a CudaContext class. This design allows an intuitive and simple access to all API calls by providing correspondent methods per class. A good example for this wrapping approach is a device variable. In the original Cuda driver API those are given by standard C pointers. In managedCuda these are represented by the class Cuda[Pitched]DeviceVariable. It is a generic class allowing type safe and object oriented access to the Cuda driver API. As a CudaDeviceVariable instance knows about its wrapped data type, array sizes, dimensions and eventually a memory alignment pitch, a simple call to CopyToHost(“hostArray”) is enough. The user doesn’t need to handle the entire C like function arguments, this is all done automatically. Further managedCuda provides specific exceptions in case something goes wrong, i.e. you don’t need to check API call return values, you only need to catch the CudaException just as any other exception.

But still, as a developer using managedCuda you need to know Cuda. You must know how to use contexts, set kernel launch grid configurations etc.