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)

The cuRAND device function library

Let's start with cuRAND. This is a standard CUDA library that is used for generating pseudo-random values within a CUDA kernel on a thread-by-thread basis, which is initialized and invoked by calling device functions from each individual thread within a kernel. Let's emphasize again that this is a pseudo-random sequence of values—since the digital hardware is always deterministic and never random or arbitrary, we use algorithms to generate a sequence of apparently random values from an initial seed value. Usually, we can set the seed value to a truly random value (such as the clock time in milliseconds), which will yield us with a nicely arbitrary sequence of random values. These generated random values have no correlation with prior or future values in the sequence generated by the same seed, although there can be correlations...