Why is my pcl cuda code running in CPU instead of GPU?

问题

I have a code where I use the pcl/gpu namespace:

pcl::gpu::Octree::PointCloud clusterCloud;
clusterCloud.upload(cloud_filtered->points);

pcl::gpu::Octree::Ptr octree_device (new pcl::gpu::Octree);
octree_device->setCloud(clusterCloud);
octree_device->build();

/*tree->setCloud (clusterCloud);*/

// Create the cluster extractor object for the planar model and set all the parameters
std::vector<pcl::PointIndices> cluster_indices;
pcl::gpu::EuclideanClusterExtraction ec;
ec.setClusterTolerance (0.1);
ec.setMinClusterSize (2000);
ec.setMaxClusterSize (250000);
ec.setSearchMethod (octree_device);
ec.setHostCloud (cloud_filtered);

ec.extract (cluster_indices);

I have installed CUDA and included the needed pcl/gpu ".hpp"s to do this. It compiles (I have a catkin workspace with ROS) and when I do run it works really slow. I used nvidia-smi and my code is only running in the CPU, and I don't know why and how to solve it.

This code is an implementation of the gpu/segmentation example here: pcl/seg.cpp

回答1:

(Making this an answer since it's too long for a comment.)

I don't know pcl, but maybe it's because you pass a host-side std::vector rather than data that's on the device side.

... what is "host side" and "device side", you ask? And what's std?

Well, std is just a namespace used by the C++ standard library. std::vector is a (templated) class in the C++ standard library, which dynamically allocates memory for the elements you put in it.

The thing is, the memory std::vector uses is your main system memory (RAM) which doesn't have anything to do with the GPU. But it's likely that your pcl library requires that you pass data that's in GPU memory - which can't be the data in an std::vector. You would need to allocate device-side memory and copy your data there from the host side memory.