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)

Chapter 4, Kernels, Threads, Blocks, and Grids

  1. Try it.
  2. All of the threads don't operate on the GPU simultaneously. Much like a CPU switching between tasks in an OS, the individual cores of the GPU switch between the different threads for a kernel.
  3. O( n/640 log n), that is, O(n log n).
  4. Try it.

  1. There is actually no internal grid-level synchronization in CUDA—only block-level (with __syncthreads). We have to synchronize anything above a single block with the host.
  2. Naive: 129 addition operations. Work-efficient: 62 addition operations.
  3. Again, we can't use __syncthreads if we need to synchronize over a large grid of blocks. We can also launch over fewer threads on each iteration if we synchronize on the host, freeing up more resources for other operations.
  4. In the case of a naive parallel sum, we will likely be working with only a small number of data points that...