CUDALink not working on Mac OS X

Question

On my MacBook Pro, I have a CUDA enabled video card, yet Mathematica does not seem to recognize this. For example, following the CUDALink Setup, I get

Needs["CUDALink`"]
CUDAQ[]
(* False *)
CUDADriverVersion[] 
(* CUDADriverVersion::nodriv message raised. *)

Additionally, according to the documentation, my card is not listed, despite NVidia saying otherwise.

How do I convince Mathematica that my card supports CUDA?

I think this'll need an update for v9. I have CUDA working with v8 but not v9. — Szabolcs, Nov 29 '12 at 03:45
@Szabolcs I have not tried it with 9. Will have to do that this weekend ... — rcollyer, Nov 29 '12 at 04:40
It turns out that the problem was that v9 tried to use the resources downloaded for v8, but the binaries are incompatible. I couldn't figure out how to remove the resource packet, so I removed the Library/Mathematica directory entirely, let Mathematica 9 re-download the CUDA resources, and now everything is working fine. — Szabolcs, Nov 30 '12 at 02:19

rcollyer · Accepted Answer · 2012-06-05T21:53:14.590

12

The answer, in this case, is updating the CUDA driver manually. Finding the driver, though, is non-trivial. For instance, this page says that there are no drivers available for the mac. To find the CUDA drivers, you need to find the Developer Zone, and go to the CUDA downloads page. Interestingly enough, the Getting Started Documentation (pdf) is Windows specific and does not include the 300 series in its list of supported cards. However, downloading the CUDA for MAC drivers works just fine on my machine. Note: you only need to download the drivers (currently the middle of the three links) to get it working.

Needs["CUDALink`"]
CUDAQ[] (* True *)
CUDADriverVersion[] (* 4.2.9 *)

alongside the rest of the tests. But, the proof is in the graphics:

data = CUDAVolumetricDataRead[
        FileNameJoin[{$CUDALinkExampleDataPath, "Bucky.raw"}], 
        32, 32
       ];
CUDAVolumetricRender[data, "Width" -> 400, "Height" -> 400]

output from CUDAVolumetricRender

edited Jun 05 '12 at 21:53

answered Jun 05 '12 at 14:50

rcollyer

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You have a Mac with an Nvidia card? How did you get it? I'd buy one if I could. – Jens Jun 05 '12 at 15:25
1

@Jens I have a 2010 model. It appears that the current line of macbooks have AMD Radeons. – rcollyer Jun 05 '12 at 15:31
@Jens My 2008 MBP has a CUDA capable Nvidia card. I guess the newer ones don't – rm -rf Jun 05 '12 at 16:03
@R.M But, the Radeon's support OpenCL which is baked into the OS starting v. 10.6. – rcollyer Jun 05 '12 at 16:10
@R.M. yes, but OpenCL is less mature than CUDA, and you have to implement more things by hand (e.g. if you want to use BLAS/LAPACK). Thanks for the info! – Jens Jun 05 '12 at 17:14
Do you needto download all three packages (CUDA toolkit, drivers, SDK) or just the drivers? – Sjoerd C. de Vries Jun 05 '12 at 21:23
@SjoerdC.deVries just the drivers. Do I need to make it clear in the answer? – rcollyer Jun 05 '12 at 21:36
Probably better to avoid any confusion. – Sjoerd C. de Vries Jun 05 '12 at 21:40
@SjoerdC.deVries done. – rcollyer Jun 05 '12 at 21:53
Thanks. I downloaded the dev drivers to see whether they might solve my transparancy problems. Alas, they're still there. Very frustrating. – Sjoerd C. de Vries Jun 05 '12 at 21:53
@Jens the 15 inch macbook pro has an NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M which is CUDA capable. You just have to download the drivers. – rcollyer Feb 27 '13 at 14:09
@rcollyer Yes, I bought one shortly after that. – Jens Feb 27 '13 at 16:22
@Jens Great. I was just playing with this again (on a newer laptop), and I just wanted to let you know that they were still available. – rcollyer Feb 27 '13 at 16:36
@rcollyer Are you running Mountain Lion? I bought mine before ML came out and haven't uppgraded yet. However, that laptop is the only one ever that regularly crashes for me. I think it's because of the Nvidia card, and disabling switching hasn't helped. So I mostly work on a slightly older laptop which is completely stable, and sync both using Unison. If ML fixes my crash problem, that would obviously be a big reason to upgrade... – Jens Feb 27 '13 at 17:28
@Jens yes, I'm on ML on this machine. I have not had issues with it. I have restarted this machine only 2 or 3 times since I got it in July. The only issue I have is hardware: the retina display is blurry to me, so I have to increase the resolution to read anything. – rcollyer Feb 27 '13 at 17:47

CUDALink not working on Mac OS X

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