CHAPTER 4: GPU Computing Basics with CUDA C

Author: Libby Shoop, Macalester College

To Cite:

Shoop, Libby. “GPU Computing Basics with CUDA C”. PDC for Beginners, edited by CSinParallel. 2022. Available Online.

Computing using GPUs is often reffered to as massively parallel computing, because we use Graphical Processing Unit devices that contain thousands of cores.

Manycore computing is and exciting technology that drives a great deal of cutting edge computing in Artificial Intelligence (inparticalur Deep Learning in generative AI), Robotics, and a variety of scientific research, such as weather forcasting, biofinformatics, genomics, proteomics, modeling of various physical and chemical systems.

For NVIDA GPU cards, one software system to code in is CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture), which has compilers for C, C++, and Fortran.

Language used for these examples: C, with special additions for compiling for executing on a GPU, referred to as CUDA C.

• 4.1 The manycore GPU device in a host
  • Getting the code for these examples
  • Discovering Information about your GPU
  • GPU Architecture
• 4.2 GPU Programming model
  • The dim3 data structure and the CUDA programming model
  • Executing code on the GPU device
  • Test the limits
  • Review questions
• 4.3 Mapping Threads to Data Elements
  • 1D grid of 1D blocks of threads
  • Mapping a 1D grid of 1D thread blocks to an array
  • Exercises
  • 2D grid of 2D blocks of threads
• 4.4 Example: Vector Addition
  • New indispensable additions to the code
  • The complete example
  • Use array size and block size to set grid size
  • Obtaining an array index for a thread
  • Build and run
  • Exercises
• 4.5 Vector Addition example with CUDA Unified Memory
  • This method is now preferred
  • The main program
  • Build and run
  • An Exercise
• 4.6 Vector Addition Example with Timing
  • Using a single block of threads
  • Using multiple blocks of threads
  • The complete code
  • Build and run
  • Summary
  • Exercises for Further Exploration
  • References

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