Both Ubuntu and Fedora enable /dev/shm by default as a filesystem in RAM. Is there any way to tell nvcc to use this folder for scratch space rather than /tmp in order to speed compile times?
Usually, compilers use the TMPDIR environment variable, if set, to store the temporary files. What about trying it?
$ nvcc -c conflicts.cu
$ TMPDIR=/foo nvcc -c conflicts.cu
nvopencc ERROR: $TMPDIR does not exist: /foo