Book Image

Hands-On GPU Programming with Python and CUDA

By : Dr. Brian Tuomanen
Book Image

Hands-On GPU Programming with Python and CUDA

By: Dr. Brian Tuomanen

Overview of this book

Hands-On GPU Programming with Python and CUDA hits the ground running: you’ll start by learning how to apply Amdahl’s Law, use a code profiler to identify bottlenecks in your Python code, and set up an appropriate GPU programming environment. You’ll then see how to “query” the GPU’s features and copy arrays of data to and from the GPU’s own memory. As you make your way through the book, you’ll launch code directly onto the GPU and write full blown GPU kernels and device functions in CUDA C. You’ll get to grips with profiling GPU code effectively and fully test and debug your code using Nsight IDE. Next, you’ll explore some of the more well-known NVIDIA libraries, such as cuFFT and cuBLAS. With a solid background in place, you will now apply your new-found knowledge to develop your very own GPU-based deep neural network from scratch. You’ll then explore advanced topics, such as warp shuffling, dynamic parallelism, and PTX assembly. In the final chapter, you’ll see some topics and applications related to GPU programming that you may wish to pursue, including AI, graphics, and blockchain. By the end of this book, you will be able to apply GPU programming to problems related to data science and high-performance computing.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Summary

We started this chapter by learning about dynamic parallelism, which is a paradigm that allows us to launch and manage kernels directly on the GPU from other kernels. We saw how we can use this to implement a quicksort algorithm on the GPU directly. We then learned about vectorized datatypes in CUDA, and saw how we can use these to speed up memory reads from global device memory. We then learned about CUDA Warps, which are small units of 32 threads or less on the GPU, and we saw how threads within a single Warp can directly read and write to each other's registers using Warp Shuffling. We then looked at how we can write a few basic operations in PTX assembly, including import operations such as determining the lane ID and splitting a 64-bit variable into two 32-bit variables. Finally, we ended this chapter by writing a new performance-optimized summation kernel that...