I need to write simulation data computed on GPU into an output .csv file. Normally I would just use the fstream library but that's not possible on GPU.
Are there any built-in functions or other libraries that I could use to write data to .csv or .txt files directly from device code? Right now, performance is really not that important but rather an easy interim solution.
No, it's not possible to do direct file I/O in CUDA from device code, unless you are using something like GPU Direct Storage (GDS) (which most likely you are not, at the current time, and based on your question). If you don't already have it set up, GDS might not be an "easy interim solution".
Copy the data to the host, then use whatever file I/O routines you are comfortable with.
Note that requests for library recommendations are specifically off-topic for SO.
Use the printf statement to output the prints from Cuda kernel to a text file and then parse the text file to convert to CSV.
I'm creating a file-based Octree of a Point Cloud in order to manage filters on really big file (that can't be stored in ram). The bottleneck of this method, so far, is the I/O of the leaves (because I often have to write, rewrite files and read files ...)
So I would like to use memory mapped file technique to make it faster, and I heard about Boost.
But when I search for tutorials, I have seen 2 techniques :
One use #include <boost/iostreams/device/mapped_file.hpp>
and the other
#include <boost/interprocess/file_mapping.hpp>.
In my casae, I will have to write really often entires vectors of 3D points in file, then get all informations in these files and recreate vectors from them. A lot of I/O operation with probably a lot of files.
I was wondering which one I have to use? In which case I have to use one instead of the other?
Thanks!
P.S : Is there a difference between boost iostream mapped file and boost interprocess mapped file? I have seen this post, but it doesn't help me for my particular problem.
You can use any of these, however:
Using only boost::iostreams::mapped_file object you get a file mapped into memory with array interface. It doesn't get any simpler than that. You can also use boost::iostreams::stream decorator to attach std::iostream interface to the mapped file.
Whereas boost::interprocess::file_mapping requires using boost::interprocess::mapped_region to map the file_mapping into memory. This method is more flexible as it allows to map parts of the file (rather than the entire file) with different access permissions but it is also more complex.
I'm planning to write a programm which has to access to a certain file many times in r/w.
So I decided to use fstream, since I can use this class for both reading and writing purpose.
My idea is to open the file at the startup of the application and then close it as the application is closed too.
Since the file can be arbitrarily big, I was planning to use a "paging" structure, in which:
1) preallocate a fixed amount of memory for each page and a fixed number of page
2) load part of the file in to the first free page
3) if there is no free page, I select one non empty with a certain criterion, I commit all edit in it (if there are any) and then load the part of file in the page.
That's not so hard to code. But I was wondering If I'm going to reinvent the wheel... maybe the fstream itself is written in a smart way so that it also implements a similar paging mechanism. In that case, I would not take care about, just write and read at any time.
Some suggestion?
Don't do this by yourself. Unless you are using very exotic implementation, the fstream class already implement such a mechanism efficiently.
Checkout http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/files/ "Buffers and Synchronization"
There are possible issues if you are seek-ing into file larger than 2GB with a old kernel or implementation of the standard library. Check this
Large file support in C++
or use Boost.Filesystem
Internal working of the standard C++ library vary by implementation. Hence a test would be needed to get some real data on your preferred platform. Generally memory mapped files are considered to be the fastest way to access data stored in a file (as Uflex has mentioned in his comment, but it has some drawbacks as well (see the linked wiki page). You can either use the standard (POSIX) C functions mmap() and munmap(), or the Boost C++ libraries which also have a portable C++ interface for memory mapped files.
now I am writing a app in C++, and currently my app reads models or parameters from several data files. Those files, i.e. self-define dictionary, are currently stored in plain text and to be loaded dynamically by C++ while runtime.
Yet, I don't want those files to be easily seen by my client while they get the released application, so I need to encrypt the file first. What's the general practice for this situation?
And those file are huge in size, so compile to a resource file is not a good option.
Actually I just need a simple 'encryption', at least not plain text stored in released version. And I dont want the encryption libraries which will load the whole file into the memory first in order to perform decryption, since the files are huge and no need to load its whole body into memory at one time.
Thanks!
Usually when you want to deal with encryption in C++ people tend to go for Open SSL libraries which encompass all of the functionality in a pretty standard way.
You'd have to get yourself a copy of the library and some code samples, but it's a pretty common thing and there's lots of documentation around.
I'd like to simulate a file without writing it on disk. I have a file at the end of my executable and I would like to give its path to a dll. Of course since it doesn't have a real path, I have to fake it.
I first tried using named pipes under Windows to do it. That would allow for a path like \\.\pipe\mymemoryfile but I can't make it works, and I'm not sure the dll would support a path like this.
Second, I found CreateFileMapping and GetMappedFileName. Can they be used to simulate a file in a fragment of another ? I'm not sure this is what this API does.
What I'm trying to do seems similar to boxedapp. Any ideas about how they do it ? I suppose it's something like API interception (Like Detour ), but that would be a lot of work. Is there another way to do it ?
Why ? I'm interested in this specific solution because I'd like to hide the data and for the benefit of distributing only one file but also for geeky reasons of making it works that way ;)
I agree that copying data to a temporary file would work and be a much easier solution.
Use BoxedApp and do not worry.
You can store the data in an NTFS stream. That way you can get a real path pointing to your data that you can give to your dll in the form of
x:\myfile.exe:mystreamname
This works precisely like a normal file, however it only works if the file system used is NTFS. This is standard under Windows nowadays, but is of course not an option if you want to support older systems or would like to be able to run this from a usb-stick or similar. Note that any streams present in a file will be lost if the file is sent as an attachment in mail or simply copied from a NTFS partition to a FAT32 partition.
I'd say that the most compatible way would be to write your data to an actual file, but you can of course do it one way on NTFS systems and another on FAT systems. I do recommend against it because of the added complexity. The appropriate way would be to distribute your files separately of course, but since you've indicated that you don't want this, you should in that case write it to a temporary file and give the dll the path to that file. Make sure you write the temporary file to the users' temp directory (you can find the path using GetTempPath in C/C++).
Your other option would be to write a filesystem filter driver, but that is a road that I strongly advise against. That sort of defeats the purpose of using a single file as well...
Also, in case you want only a single file for distribution, how about using a zip file or an installer?
Pipes are for communication between processes running concurrently. They don't store data for later access, and they don't have the same semantics as files (you can't seek or rewind a pipe, for instance).
If you're after file-like behaviour, your best bet will always be to use a file. Under Windows, you can pass FILE_ATTRIBUTE_TEMPORARY to CreateFile as a hint to the system to avoid flushing data to disk if there's sufficient memory.
If you're worried about the performance hit of writing to disk, the above should be sufficient to avoid the performance impact in most cases. (If the system is low enough on memory to force the file data out to disk, it's probably also swapping heavily anyway -- you've already got a performance problem.)
If you're trying to avoid writing to disk for some other reason, can you explain why? In general, it's quite hard to stop data from ever hitting the disk -- the user can always hibernate the machine, for instance.
Since you don't have control over the DLL you have to assume that the DLL expects an actual file. It probably at some point makes that assumption which is why named pipes are failing on you.
The simplest solution is to create a temporary file in the temp directory, write the data from your EXE to the temp file and then delete the temporary file.
Is there a reason you are embedding this "pseudo-file" at the end of your EXE instead of just distributing it with our application? You are obviously already distributing this third party DLL with your application so one more file doesn't seem like it is going to hurt you?
Another question, will this data be changing? That is are you expecting to write back data this "pseudo-file" in your EXE? I don't think that will work well. Standard users may not have write access to the EXE and that would probably drive anti-virus nuts.
And no CreateFileMapping and GetMappedFileName definitely won't work since they don't give you a file name that can be passed to CreateFile. If you could somehow get this DLL to accept a HANDLE then that would work.
And I wouldn't even bother with API interception. Just hand the DLL a path to an acutal file.
Reading your question made me think: if you can pretend an area of memory is a file and have kind of "virtual path" to it, then this would allow loading a DLL directly from memory which is what LoadLibrary forbids by design by asking for a path name. And this is why people write their own PE loader when they want to achieve that.
I would say you can't achieve what you want with file mapping: the purpose of file mapping is to treat a portion of a file as if it was physical memory, and you're wanting the reciprocal.
Using Detours implies that you would have to replicate everything the intercepted DLL function does except from obtaining data from a real file; hence it's not generic. Or, even more intricate, let's pretend the DLL uses fopen; then you provide your own fopen that detects a special pattern in the path and you mimmic the C runtime internals... Hmm is it really worth all the pain? :D
Please explain why you can't extract the data from your EXE and write it to a temporary file. Many applications do this -- it's the classic solution to this problem.
If you really must provide a "virtual file", the cleanest solution is probably a filesystem filter driver. "clean" doesn't mean "good" -- a filter is a fully documented and supported solution, so it's cleaner than API hooking, injection, etc. However, filesystem filters are not easy.
OSR Online is the best place to find Windows filesystem information. The NTFSD mailing list is where filesystem developers hang out.
How about using a some sort of RamDisk and writing the file to this disk? I have tried some ramdisks myself, though never found a good one, tell me if you are successful.
Well, if you need to have the virtual file allocated in your exe, you will need to create a vector, stream or char array big enough to hold all of the virtual data you want to write.
that is the only solution I can think of without doing any I/O to disk (even if you don't write to file).
If you need to keep a file like path syntax, just write a class that mimics that behaviour and instead of writing to a file write to your memory buffer. It's as simple as it gets. Remember KISS.
Cheers
Open the file called "NUL:" for writing. It's writable, but the data are silently discarded. Kinda like /dev/null of *nix fame.
You cannot memory-map it though. Memory-mapping implies read/write access, and NUL is write-only.
I'm guessing that this dll cant take a stream? Its almost to simple to ask BUT if it can you could just use that.
Have you tried using the \?\ prefix when using named pipes? Many APIs support using \?\ to pass the remainder of the path directly through without any parsing/modification.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247(VS.85,lightweight).aspx
Why not just add it as a resource - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/7k989cfy(VS.80).aspx - the same way you would add an icon.