nvidia - How to run CUDA without a GPU using a software implementation?

Question

My laptop doesn't have a nVidia graphic cards, and I want to work on CUDA. The website says that CUDA can be used in emulation mode on non-cuda hardware too. But when I tried installing CUDA drivers downloaded from their website, it gives an error "The nvidia setup couldn't locate any drivers that are compatible with your current hardware. Setup will now exit".

Also when I tried to run sample codes from SDK in Visual studio 2008, I'm getting an error that .obj file is not found.

Answer 1

The easiest way to get started with GPU development is to get a cheap (for example GTX285) GPU and a desktop computer (obviously since u can't change the GPU in your laptop).

There are a few research projects on getting CUDA kernels to work efficiently on CPUs as well as on FPGAs (Google wen mei hwu and see his research projects) however if you want to learn CUDA this is not for you, as said above the easiest way is to get some cheap hardware.