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ccudatiming

Which timer to use when comparing C code to CUDA code?

I'm currently doing two implementations of an algorithm, one in C and the other in CUDA, and am planning to do a comparison between the two in terms of runtime. My question is, what would be the best C timer to use considering I'm going to be comparing runtimes in C and CUDA. For CUDA, I shall be using Events, and I've read about wall clock timers in C such as clock() and gettimeofday() as well as high-resolution timers such as clock_gettime(), but am unsure which C one to use if I'm going to be comparing my C times against CUDA times?

Thanks :-)

Solution

  • It's probably best just to stick to something relatively simple, I'd recommend gettimeofday, which will provide a timestamp with microsecond accuracy. Just record the time before and after doing your computation, then subtract the two. You can use the timersub macro to do this.

    http://linux.die.net/man/2/gettimeofday

    http://linux.die.net/man/3/timercmp