CUDA Application Design and Development

by Rob Farber

Overview

As the computer industry retools to leverage massively parallel graphics processing units (GPUs), this book is designed to meet the needs of working software developers who need to understand GPU programming with CUDA and increase efficiency in their projects. CUDA Application Design and Development starts with an introduction to parallel computing concepts for readers with no previous parallel experience, and focuses on issues of immediate importance to working software developers: achieving high performance, maintaining competitiveness, analyzing CUDA benefits versus costs, and determining application lifespan.

The book then details the thought behind CUDA and teaches how to create, analyze, and debug CUDA applications. Throughout, the focus is on software engineering issues: how to use CUDA in the context of existing application code, with existing compilers, languages, software tools, and industry-standard API libraries.

Using an approach refined in a series of well-received articles at Dr Dobb's Journal, author Rob Farber takes the reader step-by-step from fundamentals to implementation, moving from language theory to practical coding.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780123884268
Publisher:	Elsevier Science
Publication date:	10/31/2011
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	7.46(w) x 9.18(h) x 0.82(d)

About the Author

Rob Farber has served as a scientist in Europe at the Irish Center for High-End Computing as well as U.S. national labs in Los Alamos, Berkeley, and the Pacific Northwest. He has also been on the external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, consultant to fortune 100 companies, and co-founder of two computational startups that achieved liquidity events. He is the author of “CUDA Application Design and Development” as well as numerous articles and tutorials that have appeared in Dr. Dobb's Journal and Scientific Computing, The Code Project and others.

Table of Contents

1. First Programs and How to Think in CUDA

2. CUDA for Machine Learning and Optimization

3. The CUDA Tool Suite: Profiling a PCA/NLPCA Functor

4. The CUDA Execution Model

5. CUDA Memory

6. Efficiently Using GPU Memory

7. Techniques to Increase Parallelism

8. CUDA for All GPU and CPU Applications

9. Mixing CUDA and Rendering

10. CUDA in a Cloud and Cluster Environments

11. CUDA for Real Problems: Monte Carlo, Modeling, and More

12. Application Focus on Live Streaming Video

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

A roadmap for developers facing the challenge of developing applications to effectively use GPUs with CUDA to achieve efficiency and performance goals

Editorial Reviews

"The book by Rob Faber on CUDA Application Design and Development is required reading for anyone who wants to understand and efficiently program CUDA for scientific and visual programming. It provides a hands-on exposure to the details in a readable and easy to understand form." —Jack Dongarra, Innovative Computing Laboratory, EECS Department, University of Tennessee

"GPUs have the potential to take computational simulations to new levels of scale and detail. Many scientists are already realising these benefits, tackling larger and more complex problems that are not feasible on conventional CPU-based systems. This book provides the tools and techniques for anyone wishing to join these pioneers, in an accessible though thorough text that a budding CUDA programmer would do well to keep close to hand." —Dr. George Beckett, EPCC, University of Edinburgh

"With his book, Farber takes us on a journey to the exciting world of programming multi-core processor machines with CUDA. Farber's pragmatic approach is effective in guiding the reader across challenges and their solutions. Farber's broader presentation of parallel programming with CUDA ranging from CUDA in Cloud and Cluster environments to CUDA for real problems and applications helps the reader learning about the unique opportunities this parallel programming language can offer to the scientific community. This book is definitely a must for students, teachers, and developers!" —Michela Taufer, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Delaware

"Rob Farber has written an enlightening and accessible book on the application to CUDA for real research tasks, with an eye to developing scalable and distributed GPU applications. He supplies clear and usable code examples combined with insight about _why_ one should use a particular approach. This is an excellent book filled with practical advice for experienced CUDA programmers and ground-up guidance for beginners wondering if CUDA can accelerate their time to solution." —Paul A. Navrátil, Manager, Visualization Software, Texas Advanced Computing Center

"The book provides a solid introduction to the CUDA programming language starting with the basics and progressively exposing the reader to advanced concepts through the well annotated implementation of real-world applications. It makes a first-rate presentation of CUDA, its use in the implementation of portable and efficient applications and the underlying architecture of GPGPU/CPU systems with particular emphasis on memory hierarchies. This is complemented by a thorough presentation both of the CUDA Tool Suite and of techniques for the parallelisation of applications. Farber's book is a valuable addition to the bookshelves of both the advanced and novice CUDA programmer." —Francis Wray, Independent Consultant and Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Computing, Information Systems and Mathematics at the University of Kingston

From the Publisher