install Pycuda 2013.1.1 on Windows 7 64bit
Question: I followed instructions
[here](http://wiki.tiker.net/PyCuda/Installation/Windows#Windows_7_64-bit_with_Visual_Studio_Professional_2008_.28Strictly_Binary_Versions.29)
. I have installed all packages from
<http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/> (all the latest one).

It seems I installed successfully. I ran the code below in Ipython:

    
    
    import pycuda.gpuarray as gpuarray
    import pycuda.driver as cuda
    import pycuda.autoinit
    import numpy
    
    a_gpu = gpuarray.to_gpu(numpy.random.randn(4,4).astype(numpy.float32))  ## pass
    a_doubled = (2*a_gpu).get()  ## the line can't be passed with Ipython
    

and got this error:

> File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\pycuda\compiler.py", line 137, in
> compile_plain  
>  lcase_err_text = (stdout+stderr).decode("utf-8").lower() File
> "C:\Python27\lib\encodings\utf_8.py", line 16, in decode return
> codecs.utf_8_decode(input, errors, True) UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec
> can't decode byte 0xb8 in position 109: invalid start byte

How to solve this issue? I have struggled several days.


Answer: This appears to have been caused by an error handling issue inside PyCUDA when
code contains unparseable unicode. The bug was
[fixed](https://github.com/inducer/pycuda/issues/37) in late 2013 and should
have been pushed in the PyCUDA 2014.1 release.

[This answer was added as a community wiki entry to get this question off the
unanswered list for the CUDA and PyCUDA tags]

