Add/update build to use CUDA 12

We are having reports in Spack of users complaining of building errors with CUDA 12 as shown in https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/38697#issuecomment-1624443902.

assigned to @vbolea

I just wanted to add that as of version 17.10 Visual Studio does not officially support CUDA 11 anymore (and vice versa).[1][2]

I tried compiling all combinations of vtk-m [master,release,2.1.0] and CUDA [12.4,12.5] on Windoes 11 / MSVC v17.10.1 today, and couldn't get it to work. Similar build errors with thrust in all combinations (e.g, "thrust::detail is ambiguous").

Possible Workarounds on Windows/Visual Studio:

1. Use CUDA 11.8 and downgrade to VS 17.9 (or at least it's toolset[3]). (I have not tried this.)

2. Use CUDA 11.8, keep VS 17.10, and disable the version checks in nvcc[1]. (Works for me, but proceed carefully.):

   • Create system environment variable before cmake/build of vtk-m: NVCC_PREPEND_FLAGS=-allow-unsupported-compiler (Setting this via CMake configure would be too late, since CUDA discovery fails during configure).

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/78515942/cuda-compatibility-with-visual-studio-2022-version-17-10 [2] https://github.com/microsoft/STL/pull/4475 [3] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/side-by-side-minor-version-msvc-toolsets-in-visual-studio-2019/

UPDATE 2024-09-04: For newer Visual Studio versions, there is an additional check to be disabled: NVCC_PREPEND_FLAGS=-allow-unsupported-compiler -D_ALLOW_COMPILER_AND_STL_VERSION_MISMATCH (Let's hope there soon will be a vtk version with a newer vtk-m included, so we can finally remove this hack )

Thanks for this detail info, we do not have plans to do this task in the short term, but we will eventually have it done.

@vbolea is CUDA 12 still an issue for the VTK-m 2.2 release, or was this resolved? (Relaying question from a downstream user)

I believe that this has been resolved in the spack vtk-m package. Please re-open if you are still unable to build vtk-m with cuda 12 in Spack

closed