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 5, Streams, Events, Contexts, and Concurrency

  1. The performance improves for both; as we increase the number of threads, the GPU reaches peak utilization in both cases, reducing the gains made through using streams.
  2. Yes, you can launch an arbitrary number of kernels asynchronously and synchronize them to with cudaDeviceSynchronize.
  3. Open up your text editor and try it!
  4. High standard deviation would mean that the GPU is being used unevenly, overwhelming the GPU at some points and under-utilizing it at others. A low standard deviation would mean that all launched operations are running generally smoothly.
  5. i. The host can generally handle far fewer concurrent threads than a GPU. ii. Each thread requires its own CUDA context. The GPU can become overwhelmed with excessive contexts, since each has its own memory space and has to handle its own loaded executable code.
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