Root access required for CUDA?

I am using GeForce 8400M GS on Ubuntu 10.04 and I am learning CUDA programming. I am writing and running few basic programs. I was using cudaMalloc, and it kept giving me an error until I ran the code as root. However, I had to run the code as root only once. After that, even if I run the code as normal user, I do not get an error on malloc. What's going on?