Nsight Visual Studio Code Edition

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Nsight Visual Studio Code edition is an extension for Visual Studio Code that provides support for CUDA development, including features such as Intellisense, debugging, debugger views, and productivity enhancements.

Benefits

• Higher Productivity
  Using smart CUDA auto-code completion features improves the overall development experience and enables users to save time and effort when writing code.

• Interactivity
  Debugging with Nsight Visual Studio Code Edition provides diverse benefits, including code formatting, easy navigation through source code, displaying and interacting with different source files, building executables, and testing.

• Remote Development Support
  Nsight Visual Studio Code Edition enables developers to implement CUDA code in various cluster environments such as Virtual Machines or remote Docker containers. It also supports code development for Linux systems via the Remote – WSL extension.

• Free
  As with other Nsight tools from NVIDIA, Nsight Visual Studio Code Edition is offered free of charge. We love it when your code works better and is delivered sooner. Enjoy!

Key Features

• CUDA Syntax Highlighting for Code Development and Debugging
  Edit code productively with syntax highlighting and IntelliSense for CUDA code. Auto-completion, go to definition, find references, rename symbols, and more all seamlessly work for kernel functions the same as they do for C++ functions.

• CUDA Kernel Breakpoint Support and Kernel Execution Control
  Break into a debugging session in CPU or GPU device code using standard breakpoints, including support for conditional breakpoints with expression evaluation. GUI controls allow you to step over, into, or out of statements in the source code, just like normal CPU debugging. Breakpoints are evaluated for every kernel thread and will halt execution when any thread encounters them.

• GPU and Kernel State Inspection
  Break into the debugger to see all the detailed information at any point in the application with GPU debugging support for register, variable, and call-stack. There is watchlist support to add specific variables of interest for tracking. Additionally, there are focus controls to manually select block and thread coordinates to switch the debugger focus.

Want to know more?

• See the Nsight VSCode Edition spotlight video
  This Nsight VSCode Edition spotlight shows you how Nsight VSCode Edition fits in with the other NVIDIA IDE debuggers and can be set up in Microsoft's Visual Studio Code. Then, you'll see all the key features in action. You're going to love it!

• See Nsight VSCode Edition demonstrated at GTC'21
  GTC'21 Video On Demand: Latest Enhancements to CUDA Debugger IDEs

• View the Microsoft announcement for the VSCode extension by Nsight VSCE
  CUDA Support in Visual Studio Code with Julia Reid

• Read the blog posting
  Announcing NVIDIA Nsight Visual Studio Code Edition: New Addition to the Nsight Developer Tools Suite

• Visit the Nsight VSCode Edition overview page
  The Nsight VSCode Edition overview page is your information hub for general information, availability, videos, and other links to other NVIDIA tools for GPU code development.

Requirements

• CUDA Toolkit: Install the CUDA Toolkit to get important tools for CUDA application development including the NVCC compiler driver and cuda-gdb, the NVIDIA tool for debugging CUDA.

• Microsoft vscode-cpptools: Install Microsoft's C/C++ for Visual Studio Code to get Intellisense support for CUDA C++ code. Nsight VS Code Edition will automatically install this extension.

Quick Start

Open or create a new CUDA application.
Configure the debugging connection
by creating a launch configuration to launch and debug your application, or
an attach configuration if the target application is already running

Start debugging!

Support

Reach out to us for feedback and questions via our developer forum.

Data and telemetry

This extension collects usage data and sends it to NVIDIA to help improve our products. This extension respects the "telemetry.enableTelemetry" setting, for more info see Visual Studio Code Telemetry.