cuda-rust

CUDA Rust

CUDA Rust is NVIDIA’s CUDA platform for Rust. It provides host-side crates for working with the CUDA driver and device-side crates and tools for writing GPU kernels in idiomatic Rust.

• cuda-oxide (book): A custom rustc codegen backend, cargo helper utility, and crates to help users target the traditional CUDA SIMT (Single Instruction, Multiple Threads) kernel programming model. Here users have access to every detail of device-side CUDA programming.
• cutile-rs (book): A proc-macro plugin and crates to help users write CUDA kernels using the CUDA Tile programming model. Tensors are views into device memory, partitioned into sub-tensors; a kernel loads tiles from them, computes on whole tiles at a time, and stores tiles back, and the compiler decides how tiles map onto each architecture.
• Runtime: cuda-bindings, cuda-core (with cuda-core-derive), and cuda-async provide a shared runtime: driver bindings, contexts, streams, device buffers, events, and lazy, composable device operations.

Both kernel programming models extend Rust’s ownership rules across the GPU launch boundary: mutable buffers are partitioned into disjoint pieces before launch, immutable buffers are shared, and launchers keep those borrows alive while GPU work is in flight.

CUDA Rust is an early-stage research project. Expect bugs, incomplete features, and API breakage. That said, we hope you’ll try it in your own work and help shape its direction by sharing feedback on your experience.

Picking a model

	cuda-oxide (SIMT)	cutile-rs (Tile)
Feels familiar to	CUDA C++ programmers: threads, blocks, shared memory	NumPy or PyTorch programmers: ndarray / tensor operations on multi-dimensional tiles
Safety	Data-race freedom for disjoint slice accesses; you control thread synchronization and shared memory	Data-race freedom by construction within a kernel: no explicit thread indexing, shared memory, or synchronization
Indexing	Explicit thread/block indices	Implicit via partitions
Compiles	Ahead of time, Rust → PTX	JIT at first launch, Rust → Tile IR → cubin
Toolchain	Pinned stable Rust (1.99.1), managed by cargo oxide	Stable Rust 1.89 or newer
Portability	Produces PTX that the driver compiles for compatible GPUs; you control tuning per GPU	CUDA architecture-agnostic; the compiler tunes per GPU
Reach for it when	You need direct control over threads, warps, shared memory, TMA, or cluster ops	Your problem is naturally expressed as tensor computations and you want the compiler to handle scheduling details

Choose between Tile and SIMT based on each kernel’s requirements. Tile can simplify development when its abstractions fit the workload, while SIMT provides direct control over individual threads. An application can use both.

Here are some recommendations that may evolve as CUDA Rust matures:

• If you have familiarity with CUDA programming, then SIMT will feel comfortable to you.
• If your problem domain primarily involves math over densely packed numerical data, then Tile is a good fit.
• If your problem domain is sparse, involves pointer chasing, mapping traditional data structures to the GPU, or otherwise similar, then SIMT will give you more flexibility.
• If you are willing to put in more effort, expertise, or tokens for performance tuning, CuTe abstractions on top of SIMT can be a good fit.

Kernels from both models interoperate: a cutile-rs Tile kernel and a cuda-oxide SIMT kernel can run on the same stream over shared device buffers.

Repository layout

cuda-rust/
├── cuda-bindings/      runtime — CUDA driver API bindings
├── cuda-core/          runtime — contexts, streams, memory, modules, events, launch
├── cuda-core-derive/   runtime — derive macros for cuda-core
├── cuda-repr/          shared no_std host/device representation contracts
├── cuda-async/         runtime — lazy ops, futures, streams, graphs
├── cuda-oxide/         SIMT model — compiler, device crates, cuda-oxide-book
└── cutile-rs/          Tile model — compiler, tile crates, cutile-book

Documentation

Start with the CUDA Rust docs. cutile-rs and cuda-oxide each have a book with installation instructions, guides, and reference material. The runtime crates (cuda-bindings, cuda-core, cuda-async) are documented in the cutile-rs book.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for commit sign-off requirements, pull requests, and CI. Both components build on stable Rust and pin their toolchains in their respective rust-toolchain.toml files (with rustc-dev and llvm-tools for cuda-oxide, managed via cargo oxide); each book covers its own setup.

License

CUDA Rust is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. The root LICENSE covers the whole repository: cuda-oxide, cutile-rs, and the shared host crates. Every published crate declares license = "Apache-2.0".

Third-party attributions are listed in cuda-oxide/THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.