First-chance exception cudaError_enum at memory location

Question

I'm getting this error when running my app from Visual Studio 2012. Development Specs:

• Cuda 5.0
• VS C++ 2012
• Quadro K4000

I've seen there are other posts related here, here and here but none has a good answer to my problem. I'm checking all the return codes from CUDA API, CuRAND and CuBLAS and all are returning SUCCESS. I looked in the code where was the problem raising and it happens to be when I create a timer object for the GPU.

I'm using the timer that comes with CUDA SDK

struct GpuTimer{
    cudaEvent_t start;
    cudaEvent_t stop;
    GpuTimer(){
        checkCudaErr(
            cudaEventCreate(&start)
            );

        checkCudaErr(
            cudaEventCreate(&stop)
            );
    }
    ~GpuTimer(){
        checkCudaErr(
            cudaEventDestroy(start)
            );
        checkCudaErr(
            cudaEventDestroy(stop)
            );
    }
    void Start(){
        checkCudaErr(
            cudaEventRecord(start, 0)
            );
    }
    void Stop(){
        checkCudaErr(
            cudaEventRecord(stop, 0)
            );
    }
    float Elapsed(){
        float elapsed;
        checkCudaErr(
            cudaEventSynchronize(stop)
            );

        checkCudaErr(
            cudaEventElapsedTime(&elapsed, start, stop)
            );
        return elapsed;
    }
};

so in the main function I have

int main(args)
{
   ...
   ...
   ...
   GpuTimer t;
   ...
   ...
}

and exactly after that line is executed I get

'App.exe' (Win32): Loaded 'C:\Windows\System32\nvcuda.dll'. Module was built without symbols.
'App.exe' (Win32): Loaded 'C:\Windows\System32\user32.dll'. Cannot find or open the PDB file.
'App.exe' (Win32): Loaded 'C:\Windows\System32\gdi32.dll'. Cannot find or open the PDB file.
'App.exe' (Win32): Loaded 'C:\Windows\System32\lpk.dll'. Cannot find or open the PDB file.
'App.exe' (Win32): Loaded 'C:\Windows\System32\usp10.dll'. Cannot find or open the PDB file.
'App.exe' (Win32): Loaded 'C:\Windows\System32\msvcrt.dll'. Cannot find or open the PDB file.
'App.exe' (Win32): Loaded 'C:\Windows\System32\setupapi.dll'. Cannot find or open the PDB file.
'App.exe' (Win32): Loaded 'C:\Windows\System32\cfgmgr32.dll'. Cannot find or open the PDB file.
'App.exe' (Win32): Loaded 'C:\Windows\System32\rpcrt4.dll'. Cannot find or open the PDB file.
'App.exe' (Win32): Loaded 'C:\Windows\System32\advapi32.dll'. Cannot find or open the PDB file.
'App.exe' (Win32): Loaded 'C:\Windows\System32\sechost.dll'. Cannot find or open the PDB file.
'App.exe' (Win32): Loaded 'C:\Windows\System32\oleaut32.dll'. Cannot find or open the PDB file.
'App.exe' (Win32): Loaded 'C:\Windows\System32\ole32.dll'. Cannot find or open the PDB file.
'App.exe' (Win32): Loaded 'C:\Windows\System32\devobj.dll'. Cannot find or open the PDB file.
'App.exe' (Win32): Loaded 'C:\Windows\System32\shell32.dll'. Cannot find or open the PDB file.
'App.exe' (Win32): Loaded 'C:\Windows\System32\shlwapi.dll'. Cannot find or open the PDB file.
'App.exe' (Win32): Loaded 'C:\Windows\System32\imm32.dll'. Cannot find or open the PDB file.
'App.exe' (Win32): Loaded 'C:\Windows\System32\msctf.dll'. Cannot find or open the PDB file.
'App.exe' (Win32): Loaded 'C:\Windows\System32\dwmapi.dll'. Cannot find or open the PDB file.
'App.exe' (Win32): Unloaded 'C:\Windows\System32\dwmapi.dll'
'App.exe' (Win32): Loaded 'C:\Windows\System32\nvapi64.dll'. Cannot find or open the PDB file.
'App.exe' (Win32): Loaded 'C:\Windows\System32\version.dll'. Cannot find or open the PDB file.
'App.exe' (Win32): Loaded 'C:\Windows\System32\wintrust.dll'. Cannot find or open the PDB file.
'App.exe' (Win32): Loaded 'C:\Windows\System32\crypt32.dll'. Cannot find or open the PDB file.
'App.exe' (Win32): Loaded 'C:\Windows\System32\msasn1.dll'. Cannot find or open the PDB file.
First-chance exception at 0x000007FEFDA29E5D in App.exe: Microsoft C++ exception: cudaError_enum at memory location 0x000000000018EA00. //Repeated 20 times at least

finally, just after launching the application I saw this messages in the output console (on VS2012)

'App.exe' (Win32): Loaded 'C:\Program Files\NVIDIA GPU Computing Toolkit\CUDA\v5.0\bin\cudart64_50_35.dll'. Module was built without symbols.
'App.exe' (Win32): Loaded 'C:\Program Files\NVIDIA GPU Computing Toolkit\CUDA\v5.0\bin\cublas64_50_35.dll'. Module was built without symbols.
'App.exe' (Win32): Loaded 'C:\Program Files\NVIDIA GPU Computing Toolkit\CUDA\v5.0\bin\curand64_50_35.dll'. Module was built without symbols.

The application runs just fine and results look fine to me but I would like to know what could be causing this errors/exceptions and how to solve them, or if I should just ignore them.

Answer 1

The observation you are making has to do with an exception that is caught and handled properly within the CUDA libraries. It is, in some cases, a normal part of CUDA GPU operation. As you have observed, your application returns no API errors and runs correctly. If you were not within the VS environment that can report this, you would not observe this at all.

This is considered normal behavior under CUDA 5.0. I believe there were some attempts to eliminate it in CUDA 5.5. You might wish to try that, although it's not considered an issue either way.

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