Course on CUDA Programming on NVIDIA GPUs, July 22-26, 2024

The course will be taught by Prof. Mike Giles and Prof. Wes Armour. They have both used CUDA in their research for many years, and set up and manage JADE, the first national GPU supercomputer for Machine Learning.

This is a one-week hands-on course on how to develop applications to run on NVIDIA GPUs using the CUDA programming environment. All that will be assumed is some proficiency with C and basic C++ programming. No prior experience with parallel computing will be assumed.

Timetable

For the first three days we will follow this timetable: On the last two days we will switch to having both lectures in the morning, and then have practicals all afternoon.

Preliminary Reading

Please read chapters 1 and 2 of the NVIDIA CUDA C Programming Guide which is available both as PDF and online HTML.

Additional References


Lectures

Practicals

These will be carried out on Google Colab, with your modified notebooks automatically stored on your Google Drive.

Practical 1 is mandatory but is not assessed. Practicals 2-4 are to be completed for assessment. Practicals 7-8 are optional and particularly for those who may want to give a presentation on one of these topics.

Practical 1

Application: a trivial "hello world" example

CUDA aspects: launching a kernel, copying data to/from the graphics card, error checking and printing from kernel code

Practical 2

Application: Monte Carlo simulation using NVIDIA's CURAND library for random number generation

CUDA aspects: constant memory, random number generation, kernel timing, minimising device memory bandwidth requirements

Practical 3

Application: 3D Laplace finite difference solver

CUDA aspects: thread block size optimisation, multi-dimensional memory layout, performance profiling

Practical 4

Application: reduction

CUDA aspects: dynamic shared memory, thread synchronisation

Practical 7

Application: tri-diagonal equations -- see Lecture 7, slide 8, and also this research talk

Practical 8

Application: scan operation and recurrence equations -- see Lecture 4

Ideas for presentation topics


Acknowledgements

Many thanks to:
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