Building Cross-Platform CUDA Applications with CMake

Cross-platform software development poses a number of challenges to your application’s build process. How do you target multiple platforms without maintaining multiple platform-specific build scripts, projects, or makefiles? What if you need to build CUDA code as part of the process?
CMake is an open-source, cross-platform family of tools designed to build, test and package software across different platforms. Many developers use CMake to control their software compilation process using simple platform- and compiler-independent configuration files. CMake generates native makefiles and workspaces that can be used in the compiler environment of your choice. The suite of CMake tools were created by Kitware in response to the need for a powerful, cross-platform build environment for open-source projects such as ITK and VTK.

A new NVIDIA Developer blog post shows how easy it is to build CUDA applications using the features of CMake 3.8+. Since 2009, CMake (starting with 2.8.0) has provided the ability to compile CUDA code through custom commands, but CMake 3.8 makes CUDA C++ an intrinsically supported language. CUDA now joins the wide range of languages, platforms, compilers, and IDEs that CMake supports, as the Figure shows above.
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