Copying a struct containing pointers to CUDA device

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Edit: CUDA 6 introduces Unified Memory, which makes this “deep copy” problem a lot easier. See this post for more details.

Don’t forget that you can pass structures by value to kernels. This code works:

// pass struct by value (may not be efficient for complex structures)
__global__ void kernel2(StructA in)
{
    in.arr[threadIdx.x] *= 2;
}

Doing so means you only have to copy the array to the device, not the structure:

int h_arr[N] = {1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10};
StructA h_a;
int *d_arr;

// 1. Allocate device array.
cudaMalloc((void**) &(d_arr), sizeof(int)*N);

// 2. Copy array contents from host to device.
cudaMemcpy(d_arr, h_arr, sizeof(int)*N, cudaMemcpyHostToDevice);

// 3. Point to device pointer in host struct.
h_a.arr = d_arr;

// 4. Call kernel with host struct as argument
kernel2<<<N,1>>>(h_a);

// 5. Copy pointer from device to host.
cudaMemcpy(h_arr, d_arr, sizeof(int)*N, cudaMemcpyDeviceToHost);

// 6. Point to host pointer in host struct 
//    (or do something else with it if this is not needed)
h_a.arr = h_arr;

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