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)

Questions

  1. In the first CUDA-C program that we wrote, we didn't use a cudaDeviceSynchronize command after the calls we made to allocate memory arrays on the GPU with cudaMalloc. Why was this not necessary? (Hint: Review the last chapter.)
  2. Suppose we have a single kernel that is launched over a grid consisting of two blocks, where each block has 32 threads. Suppose all of the threads in the first block execute an if statement, while all of the threads in the second block execute the corresponding else statement. Will all of the threads in the second block have to "lockstep" through the commands in the if statement as the threads in the first block are actually executing them?
  3. What if we executed a similar piece of code, only over a grid consisting of one single block executed over 64 threads, where the first 32 threads execute an if and the second 32 execute an else...