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)

Thread synchronization and intercommunication

We'll now discuss two important concepts in GPU programmingthread synchronization and thread intercommunication. Sometimes, we need to ensure that every single thread has reached the same exact line in the code before we continue with any further computation; we call this thread synchronization. Synchronization works hand-in-hand with thread intercommunication, that is, different threads passing and reading input from each other; in this case, we'll usually want to make sure that all of the threads are aligned at the same step in computation before any data is passed around. We'll start here by learning about the CUDA __syncthreads device function, which is used for synchronizing a single block in a kernel.

Using...