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