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)

Using printf from within CUDA kernels

It may come as a surprise, but we can actually print text to the standard output from directly within a CUDA kernel; not only that, each individual thread can print its own output. This will come in particularly handy when we are debugging our kernels, as we may need to monitor the values of particular variables or computations at particular points in our code and it will also free us from the shackles of using a debugger to go through step by step. Printing output from a CUDA kernel is done with none other than the most fundamental function in all of C/C++ programming, the function that most people will learn when they write their first Hello world program in C: printf. Of course, printf is the standard function that prints a string to the standard output, and is really the equivalent in the C programming language of Python's print function...