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  • Book Overview & Buying GPU-Accelerated Computing with Python 3 and CUDA
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GPU-Accelerated Computing with Python 3 and CUDA

GPU-Accelerated Computing with Python 3 and CUDA

By : Niels Cautaerts, Hossein Ghorbanfekr
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GPU-Accelerated Computing with Python 3 and CUDA

GPU-Accelerated Computing with Python 3 and CUDA

By: Niels Cautaerts, Hossein Ghorbanfekr

Overview of this book

Writing high-performance Python code doesn’t have to mean switching to C++. This book shows you how to accelerate Python applications using NVIDIA’s CUDA platform and a modern ecosystem of Python tools and libraries. Aimed at researchers, engineers, and data scientists, it offers a practical yet deep understanding of GPU programming and how to fully exploit modern GPU hardware. You’ll begin with the fundamentals of CUDA programming in Python using Numba-CUDA, learning how GPUs work and how to write, execute, and debug custom GPU kernels. Building on this foundation, the book explores memory access optimization, asynchronous execution with CUDA streams, and multi-GPU scaling using Dask-CUDA. Performance analysis and tuning are emphasized throughout, using NVIDIA Nsight profilers. You’ll also learn to use high-level GPU libraries such as JAX, CuPy, and RAPIDS to accelerate numerical Python workflows with minimal code changes. These techniques are applied to real-world examples, including PDE solvers, image processing, physical simulations, and transformer models. Written by experienced GPU practitioners, this hands-on guide emphasizes reproducible workflows using Python 3.10+, CUDA 12.3+, and tools like the Pixi package manager. By the end, you’ll have future-ready skills for building scalable GPU applications in Python.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
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1
Part 1: Fundamentals of GPU programming with CUDA in Python 3
6
Part 2: Performance Optimization and Advanced CUDA Topics
10
Part 3: Using High-Level Python Libraries for GPU Computation
14
Part 4: Real-World Example Applications
19
Part 5: Beyond This Book
23
Index

Asynchronous data transfers

Synchronous copies such as cuda.to_device() and cuda.copy_to_host() block the CPU thread until the transfer is complete via enforcing implicit synchronization. This means that the CPU cannot schedule kernels or additional transfers while waiting, which prevents overlap between data movement and computation. To allow such overlap, we must instead use asynchronous copies, using cuda.to_device(..., stream=stream) or device_array.copy_to_host(stream=stream), which return control to the CPU immediately and let it continue scheduling kernels or further transfers while the data transfer proceeds in the background.

The following snippet of code illustrates how two asynchronous transfers can be issued on two separate streams:

device_array_1 = cuda.to_device(array_1, stream=stream1)
device_array_2 = cuda.to_device(array_2, stream=stream2)

On most GPUs, only one transfer in each direction (either H2D or D2H) can overlap with computation. More recent GPUs (e.g., A100)...

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