Installing CUDA on a Mac

CUDA is the Compute Unified Device Architecture from NVIDIA. It’s an environment for using the massive parallel capabilities of your video card for general purpose computing. If this sounds strange to you, just check out the description at the wikipedia.

In April version 2.2 of CUDA was made available at the CUDA Zone. I was eager to try this on my new MacBook Pro — since it is my first x86 Macintosh that uses an NVIDIA GPU. The installation of CUDA is described in the “CUDA SDK Getting Started” document. Here is one pitfall you might want to avoid.

There was no previous installation of CUDA on my system (Mac OS X 10.5.7). The default setting did not install the CUDA kernel extension to /System/Library/Extensions/CUDA.kext. I had to select custom install and check mark the CUDA Extension in the installer dialogue.

Without the extension, the examples to verify the correct installation run only in the emulator. So check the installation settings and make sure that the CUDA extension is installed, too. Oh, and don’t forget to update your .bash_profile as shown in the ”getting started“ PDF from NVIDIA.

Once you have everything up and running, try the smokeParticles application. It’s really awesome. I didn’t find a video of the smokeParticles demo, so I created one. BTW, it uses all three mouse buttons — so check your system setting for your mouse.