Sunday, April 26, 2009
Saturday, April 18, 2009
What is CUDA ?
CUDA is a parallel programming model and software environment designed to overcome this challenge while maintaining a low learning curve for programmers familiar with standard programming languages such as C.
At its core are three key abstractions – a hierarchy of thread groups, shared memories, and barrier synchronization – that are simply exposed to the programmer as a minimal set of extensions to C.
These abstractions provide fine-grained data parallelism and thread parallelism,nested within coarse-grained data parallelism and task parallelism. They guide the programmer to partition the problem into coarse sub-problems that can be solved independently in parallel, and then into finer pieces that can be solved cooperatively in parallel. Such a decomposition preserves language expressivity by allowing threads to cooperate when solving each sub-problem, and at the same time enables transparent scalability since each sub-problem can be scheduled to be solved on any of the available processor cores: A compiled CUDA program can therefore execute on any number of processor cores, and only the runtime system needs to know the physical processor count.
At its core are three key abstractions – a hierarchy of thread groups, shared memories, and barrier synchronization – that are simply exposed to the programmer as a minimal set of extensions to C.
These abstractions provide fine-grained data parallelism and thread parallelism,nested within coarse-grained data parallelism and task parallelism. They guide the programmer to partition the problem into coarse sub-problems that can be solved independently in parallel, and then into finer pieces that can be solved cooperatively in parallel. Such a decomposition preserves language expressivity by allowing threads to cooperate when solving each sub-problem, and at the same time enables transparent scalability since each sub-problem can be scheduled to be solved on any of the available processor cores: A compiled CUDA program can therefore execute on any number of processor cores, and only the runtime system needs to know the physical processor count.
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