So I have a solid-state drive that I put my system on. It is only 55G in size and Windows 7 itself takes up over half of that, that’s before installing ANYTHING. Visual Studio takes up around 9G of drive space and though you can ask it to install on another drive, that only moves 1G…the rest INSISTS on being on your C drive.
I wanted to try out cuda development though and I don’t currently have a Linux install in anything but a VM (that will be remedied eventually). The CUDA development kit requires VS though.
It is possible though to get the compiler for VS only by downloading the SDK. The SDK can mostly be installed on another drive. Though there is stuff that insists on being on your system drive, it’s more like .5G rather than 6+. Even stuff that VS installs there and won’t anywhere else can be put on another drive this way. Of course, you won’t have the debugger or the idea…but in a pinch it works.
The next thing I had to argue about is getting the CUDA compiler part to recognize the configuration. I got a weird error saying it couldn’t find configuration “null” in the amd64 directory within bin of the SDK install. That is easily fixed by creating a file called “vsvars64.bat” in that directory that has a single line in it: “call drive:\path_to\SetEnv.cmd /x64”. The ‘path_to’ part will depend on where you installed the SDK.
Then you have to close that cmd window and start again for some reason–talking about the “Windows SDK Command Prompt” from the start menu. After this you can set the PATH to include your cudapath\bin and cudapath\open64\bin. You need to be able to run `nvcc` and `nvopencc`.
Once all this was done I was able to compile a basic cuda program from the command line with: `nvcc –cl-version 2010 –use-local-env file.cu`.
This took hours of pain, google research and forum posting. Hopefully the next person in my shoes can find this and it helps. Look forward to hearing success stories and otherwise.
Crazy Eddie's Crazy C++ 