Course on CUDA Programming on NVIDIA GPUs, July 24-28, 2023

This year the course will be taught by myself and Prof. Wes Armour who is the PI for JADE, the first national GPU supercomputer for Machine Learning.

Online registration should be set up by the end of April, with a link from this webpage.

This is a one-week hands-on course for students, postdocs, academics and others who want to learn 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.

The course consists of approximately 3 hours of lectures and 4 hours of practicals each day. The aim is that by the end of the course you will be able to write relatively simple programs and will be confident and able to continue learning through studying the examples provided by NVIDIA on GitHub.

All attendees should bring a laptop to access the GPUs servers which will be used for the practicals.

The costs for the course are: Anyone with a status which does not fit into one of the categories above, including those outside the UK who are not from a university or company, should contact me to discuss the appropriate fee category.

The intention is that these costs should not deter anyone from attending the course. The higher costs for certain participants correspond to the fact that they will be paying more for their travel and accommodation, and/or their organisations will be paying more for their time spent attending the course. It also reflects the UK funding for the facilities being used.

We think it is much better for people to attend the course in person so that we can support everyone with the practicals, but if there is interest in remote attendance, particularly from those in industry who may be unable to come to Oxford for a week, then we are open to the possibility -- please discuss with me how best we could support you with the practicals.

Venue

The lectures and practicals will all take place in the Mathematical Institute. Attendees should bring laptops for accessing the remote servers to carry out the practicals. It would be good to use fully-charged laptops, but we will try to provide adequate charging points as far as possible.

Travel to Oxford

For those coming to Oxford, especially from abroad, there is travel advice here.

Accommodation and food

Those attending the course must arrange their own accommodation. These three are within a few minutes walk, and are arranged in order of increasing cost: Alternatively, you might consider using Airbnb.

For coffee, breakfast and lunch, there is a good cafe in the basement of the Mathematical Institute. Little Clarendon Street, which is nearby, has several restaurants for dinner (and an excellent ice cream shop), and there are two sandwich shops for lunch on either side of its junction with Woodstock Road (A4144 on Google Maps). The Lamb & Flag and The Eagle & Child are two popular pubs in St. Giles (the continuation of the A4144).

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. This provides more time for longer practicals, and will also allow those coming to Oxford from far away to leave when they wish on Friday 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.

CUDA is an extension of C/C++, so if you are a little rusty with C/C++ you should refresh your memory of it.

Additional References


Lectures

Practicals

Most attendees will be provided with accounts on the ARC/HTC system which has a number of NVIDIA GPU nodes. Before starting the practicals, please read these ARC notes. Some details on the Slurm batch queueing system are available here.

Those with accounts on JADE may prefer to use it for their practicals.

The practicals all use these header files (helper_cuda.h, helper_string.h) which came originally from the CUDA SDK. They provide routines for error-checking and initialisation.

Tar files for all practicals

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 Note: the instructions explain how files can be copied from my user account so there's no need to download from here

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

Practical 4

Application: reduction

CUDA aspects: dynamic shared memory, thread synchronisation

Practical 5

Application: using the CUBLAS and CUFFT libraries

Practical 6

Application: revisiting the simple "hello world" example

CUDA aspects: using g++ for the main code, building libraries, using templates

Practical 7

Application: tri-diagonal equations

Practical 8

Application: scan operation and recurrence equations

Practical 9

Application: pattern matching

Practical 10

Application: auto-tuning

Practical 11

Application: streams and OpenMP multithreading

Practical 12

Application: more on streams and overlapping computation and communication

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to:
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