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)

Implementation of a Deep Neural Network

We will now use our accumulated knowledge of GPU programming to implement our very own deep neural network (DNN) with PyCUDA. DNNs have attracted a lot of interest in the last decade, as they provide a robust and elegant model for machine learning (ML). DNNs was also one of the first applications (outside of rendering graphics) that were able to show the true power of GPUs by leveraging their massive parallel throughput, which ultimately helped NVIDIA rise to become a major player in the field of artificial intelligence.

In the course of this book, we have mostly been covering individual topics in a bubble on a chapter-by-chapter basis—here, we will build on many of the subjects we have learned about thus far for our very own implementation of a DNN. While there are several open source frameworks for GPU-based DNNs currently available...