no CUDA-capable device is detected (using ubuntu 12.04.4 server) [closed]

So it turns out the main error I was encountering was due to the fact that there was a version mismatch between the nvidia kernel module and the driver component. Here are the steps I took which helped me find a resolution.

1) downgrading the driver allowed me to see nvidia-smi -a complain about a driver component mismatch. I wasn't sure this would be a problem originally. I was simply following a CUDA toolkit setup guide, which didn't mention this being a problem.

2) Having installed the kernel modules from the repos, I just picked the corresponding driver component with correct version. If you don't know the version of your installed kernel module you can use modprobe and modinfo. For example, on my system

$ modprobe -l | grep nvidiakernel/drivers/video/nvidia/nvidiafb.kokernel/drivers/net/ethernet/nvidia/forcedeth.koupdates/dkms/nvidia.koupdates/dkms/nvidia_304_updates.ko

The module nvidia_304_updates was installed from the repos (package nvidia-updates-current). Its exact version is found with modinfo

$ modinfo /lib/modules/3.11.0-17-generic/updates/dkms/nvidia_304_updates.ko filename:       /lib/modules/3.11.0-17-generic/updates/dkms/nvidia_304_updates.koalias:          char-major-195-*version:        304.116supported:      external

After downloading and installing the corresponding driver component from the archive on the nvidia website,

http://www.nvidia.com/Download/Find.aspx?lang=en-us

, I was able to run the command

$ nvidia-smi -a==============NVSMI LOG==============Timestamp                       : Mon Apr 14 15:17:44 2014Driver Version                  : 304.116Attached GPUs                   : 1GPU 0000:04:00.0    Product Name                : GeForce GTX 680......

And the original script I was trying to execute

$ ./deviceQuery ./deviceQuery Starting... CUDA Device Query (Runtime API) version (CUDART static linking)Detected 1 CUDA Capable device(s)Device 0: "GeForce GTX 680"  CUDA Driver Version / Runtime Version          5.0 / 5.0  CUDA Capability Major/Minor version number:    3.0  Total amount of global memory:                 2047 MBytes (2146762752 bytes)  ( 8) Multiprocessors x (192) CUDA Cores/MP:    1536 CUDA Cores  ...  ...