Book Image

Hands-On GPU Computing with Python

By : Avimanyu Bandyopadhyay
Book Image

Hands-On GPU Computing with Python

By: Avimanyu Bandyopadhyay

Overview of this book

GPUs are proving to be excellent general purpose-parallel computing solutions for high-performance tasks such as deep learning and scientific computing. This book will be your guide to getting started with GPU computing. It begins by introducing GPU computing and explaining the GPU architecture and programming models. You will learn, by example, how to perform GPU programming with Python, and look at using integrations such as PyCUDA, PyOpenCL, CuPy, and Numba with Anaconda for various tasks such as machine learning and data mining. In addition to this, you will get to grips with GPU workflows, management, and deployment using modern containerization solutions. Toward the end of the book, you will get familiar with the principles of distributed computing for training machine learning models and enhancing efficiency and performance. By the end of this book, you will be able to set up a GPU ecosystem for running complex applications and data models that demand great processing capabilities, and be able to efficiently manage memory to compute your application effectively and quickly.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Computing with GPUs Introduction, Fundamental Concepts, and Hardware
5
Section 2: Hands-On Development with GPU Programming
11
Section 3: Containerization and Machine Learning with GPU-Powered Python

Comparing PyCUDA to CUDA – an introductory perspective on reduction

Let's compare PyCUDA to CUDA in terms of simplicity in parallelization before we write our first PyCUDA program on PyCharm.

In the following table, we can explore the scope of PyCUDA with respect to CUDA so as to understand scenarios when PyCUDA could be advantageous to CUDA:

CUDA

PyCUDA

Based on C/C++ programming language

Based on the Python programming language

Uses C/C++ combined with specialized code to accelerate computations

Uses Python for GPUs to interface CUDA and accelerate computations

Reduction is a key feature in CUDA that is extremely important to maximize parallelization and efficiently harness threads.

Reduction in PyCUDA is much simpler to use than CUDA, considering the significance of reduction.

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