CUDA Programming
Lei Zhou, Yafeng Yin, Yanzhi Ren,
Hong Man, Yingying Chen
Outline
GPU
CUDA Introduction
What is CUDA
CUDA Programming Model
CUDA Library
Advantages & Limitations
CUDA Programming
Future Work
GPU
GPUs are massively multithreaded many core chips
Hundreds of scalar processors
Tens of thousands of concurrent threads
1 TFLOP peak performance
Fine-grained data-parallel computation
Users across science & engineering disciplines are
achieving tenfold and higher speedups on GPU
Outline
GPU
CUDA Introduction
What is CUDA
CUDA Programming Model
CUDA Library
Advantages & Limitations
CUDA Programming
Future Work
What is CUDA?
CUDA is the acronym for Compute Unified Device
Architecture.
A parallel computing architecture developed by NVIDIA.
The computing engine in GPU.
CUDA can be accessible to software developers through
industry standard programming languages.
CUDA gives developers access to the instruction set
and memory of the parallel computation elements
in GPUs.
Processing Flow
Processing Flow of CUDA:
Copy data from main mem
to GPU mem.
CPU instructs the process
to GPU.
GPU execute parallel in
each core.
Copy the result from GPU
mem to main mem.
Outline
GPU
CUDA Introduction
What is CUDA
CUDA Programming Model
CUDA Library
Advantages & Limitations
CUDA Programming
Future Work
Definitions:
CUDA Programming Model
Device = GPU
Host = CPU
Kernel =
function that
runs on the
device
CUDA Programming Model
A kernel is executed by a grid of thread blocks
A thread block is a batch of threads that can
cooperate with each other by:
Sharing data through shared memory
Synchronizing their execution
Threads from different blocks cannot
cooperate
CUDA Kernels and Threads
Parallel portions of an application are executed on
the device as kernels
One kernel is executed at a time
Many threads execute each kernel
Differences between CUDA and CPU threads
CUDA threads are extremely lightweight
Very little creation overhead
Instant switching
CUDA uses 1000s of threads to achieve efficiency
Multi-core CPUs can use only a few
Thread Hierarchy
Thread – Distributed by the CUDA runtime
(identified by threadIdx)
Warp – A scheduling unit of up to 32 threads
Block – A user defined group of 1 to 512 threads.
(identified by blockIdx)
Grid – A group of
one or more blocks. A
grid is created for each
CUDA kernel function
Arrays of Parallel Threads
A CUDA kernel is executed by an array of threads
All threads run the same code
Each thread has an ID that it uses to compute memory
addresses and make control decisions
Minimal Kernels
Example: Increment Array Elements
Example: Increment Array Elements
Thread Cooperation
The Missing Piece: threads may need to cooperate
Thread cooperation is valuable
Share results to avoid redundant computation
Share memory accesses
Drastic bandwidth reduction
Thread cooperation is a powerful feature of CUDA
Manage memory
Moving Data…
CUDA allows us to copy data from
one memory type to another.
This includes dereferencing pointers,
even in the host’s memory (main
system RAM)
To facilitate this data movement
CUDA provides cudaMemcpy()
Advantages of CUDA
CUDA has several advantages over
traditional general purpose computation on
GPUs:
Scattered reads – code can read from arbitrary
addresses in memory.
Shared memory - CUDA exposes a fast shared
memory region (16KB in size) that can be shared
amongst threads.
Limitations of CUDA
CUDA has several limitations over traditional
general purpose computation on GPUs:
A single process must run spread across multiple
disjoint memory spaces, unlike other C language
runtime environments.
The bus bandwidth and latency between the CPU
and the GPU may be a bottleneck.
CUDA-enabled GPUs are only available from
NVIDIA.
Cuda Programming
• Cuda Specifications
– Function Qualifiers
– CUDA Built-in Device Variables
– Variable Qualifiers
• Cuda Programming and Examples
– Compile procedure
– Examples
Function Qualifiers
• _global__ : invoked from within host (CPU) code,
– cannot be called from device (GPU) code
– must return void
• __device__ : called from other GPU functions,
– cannot be called from host (CPU) code
• __host__ : can only be executed by CPU, called from
host
• __host__ and __device__ qualifiers can be combined
– Sample use: overloading operators
– Compiler will generate both CPU and GPU code
CUDA Built-in Device Variables
• All __global__ and __device__ functions have
access to these automatically defined variables
• dim3 gridDim;
– Dimensions of the grid in blocks (at most 2D)
• dim3 blockDim;
– Dimensions of the block in threads
• dim3 blockIdx;
– Block index within the grid
• dim3 threadIdx;
– Thread index within the block
Variable Qualifiers (GPU code)
• __device__
– Stored in device memory (large, high latency, no cache)
– Allocated with cudaMalloc (__device__ qualifier implied)
– Accessible by all threads
– Lifetime: application
• __shared__
– Stored in on-chip shared memory (very low latency)
– Allocated by execution configuration or at compile time
– Accessible by all threads in the same thread block
– Lifetime: kernel execution
• Unqualified variables:
– Scalars and built-in vector types are stored in registers
– Arrays of more than 4 elements stored in device memory
Cuda Programming
• Kernels are C functions with some
restrictions
– Can only access GPU memory
– Must have void return type
– No variable number of arguments (“varargs”)
– Not recursive
– No static variables
• Function arguments automatically copied
from CPUto GPU memory
Cuda Compile
Cuda Compile_cont
Cuda Compile_cont
