Optimizing CUDA Applications

NVIDIA Logo

NVIDIA Logo

In this article I will discuss a few of the best practices items as described in the “CUDA C Best Practices Guide”. This guide mentions about 40 best practices over more than 70 pages of documentation. This might be a bit more information than the average casual programmer will care to understand. In this article, I want to focus on what I feel are the most important best practices that will result in a direct performance increase to your CUDA application. If you are not familiar with CUDA yet, you may want to refer to my previous articles titled Introduction to CUDA, CUDA Thread Execution, and CUDA memory.

Continue reading

CUDA Thread Execution Model

Grid of Thread Blocks

Grid of Thread Blocks

In a previous article, I gave an introduction to programming with CUDA. Now I’d like to go into a little bit more depth about the CUDA thread execution model and the architecture of a CUDA enabled GPU. I assume that the reader has basic knowledge about CUDA and already knows how to setup a project that uses the CUDA runtime API. If you don’t know how to setup a project with CUDA, you can refer to my previous article: Introduction to CUDA.

Continue reading