Book Image

Learn CUDA Programming

By : Jaegeun Han, Bharatkumar Sharma
Book Image

Learn CUDA Programming

By: Jaegeun Han, Bharatkumar Sharma

Overview of this book

<p>Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) is NVIDIA's GPU computing platform and application programming interface. It's designed to work with programming languages such as C, C++, and Python. With CUDA, you can leverage a GPU's parallel computing power for a range of high-performance computing applications in the fields of science, healthcare, and deep learning. </p><p> </p><p>Learn CUDA Programming will help you learn GPU parallel programming and understand its modern applications. In this book, you'll discover CUDA programming approaches for modern GPU architectures. You'll not only be guided through GPU features, tools, and APIs, you'll also learn how to analyze performance with sample parallel programming algorithms. This book will help you optimize the performance of your apps by giving insights into CUDA programming platforms with various libraries, compiler directives (OpenACC), and other languages. As you progress, you'll learn how additional computing power can be generated using multiple GPUs in a box or in multiple boxes. Finally, you'll explore how CUDA accelerates deep learning algorithms, including convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs). </p><p> </p><p>By the end of this CUDA book, you'll be equipped with the skills you need to integrate the power of GPU computing in your applications.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication

Writing Python code that works with CUDA

Nowadays, many people use CUDA with Python. It works not only as a glue of binaries, but it also enables to us write GPU accelerated code directly. As a glue language, Python can call the APIs from the CUDA C/C++ libraries, using pybind11 (https://github.com/pybind/pybind11) or SWIG (http://swig.org/). However, we have to write CUDA C/C++ codes and integrate them into the Python application. 

However, there are Python packages—Numba, CuPy, and PyCUDA—that enable GPU programming with Python. They provide native accelerated APIs and wrappers for CUDA kernels. In other words, we don't have to write C/C++ code and spend our time performing integration. Numba provides a vectorization and CUDA just-in-time (jit) compiler to accelerate its operation. It is compatible with NumPy, so you can accelerate...