NVIDIA CUDA Tool Kit 7.5 / nvsmi-smi.exe

Hi,

Any CUDA programmers here? I've been trying to teach myself to program with the CUDA Tool Kit. I'm in Windows and developing in Visual Studio 2013 using c++ and the CUDA libraries included in the toolkit along with some others (Thrust c++ libs). The toolkit is available for different Linux distros too. I've been enjoying it quite a bit. I probably sound ignorant if this is common knowledge but there is a very cool GPU reporting/diagnostic utility that comes with the NVIDIA drivers.

NVIDIA System Management Interface (nvsmi-smi)

C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\NVSMI\nvidia-smi.exe

Documentation is in a PDF of that same folder but you can get the same info using -h option.

My question is, have any of you CUDA developers tried switching your Quadro to use the TCC drivers? Tesla Computer Cluster. I understand that it brings a number of benefits when developing for CUDA and comes enabled by default for Tesla cards (as would be obvious). As I understand it, using nvsmi, I think I can enable TCC for my Quadro. The GPU would not be able to act as a display card, but instead solely as a compute GPU. I would then use the iGPU for displaying and use the dGPU for my Cuda development.

Obviously I would want to be able to switch back and forth using/not-using TCC. I have the Quadro mostly for video/photo editing and would like to switch when no developing for CUDA. Is there anyone who has tried this.

Thanks


*notes from nvidia:

The TCC driver mode provides a number of advantages for CUDA applications on GPUs that support this mode. For example:

• 
  
  • TCC eliminates the timeouts that can occur when running under WDDM due to the Windows Timeout Detection and Recovery mechanism for display devices.
  • TCC allows the use of CUDA with Windows Remote Desktop, which is not possible for WDDM devices.
  • TCC allows the use of CUDA from within processes running as Windows services, which is not possible for WDDM devices.
  • TCC reduces the latency of CUDA kernel launches.

TCC is enabled by default on most recent NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. To check which driver mode is in use and/or to switch driver modes, use the nvidia-smi tool that is included with the NVIDIA Driver installation (see nvidia-smi -h for details).

Note: Keep in mind that when TCC mode is enabled for a particular GPU, that GPU cannot be used as a display device.
Note: NVIDIA GeForce GPUs do not support TCC mode.​