PAR Lecture 10, Tues Feb 21

1   Vim hint

To get vim to show line numbers, create a file ~/.exrc containing this line:

:se nu

It will be read everytime vim starts, and will set line number mode.

2   CUDA Doc

Nvidia's CUDA programming guide is excellent, albeit obsolescent in places. The Pascal info looks like it's been tacked onto an older document.

The whitepaper NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 describes, from a gaming point of view, the P104 GPU, which is in the GTX 1080, the card in parallel.ecse.

NVIDIA now has a higher level GPU, the P100, described in the P100 whitepaper and P100 technical overview. Note that the P100 is a Tesla (scientific computing) not a GeForce (gaming). This description is much more technical.

3   Managed memory issues

I'm sometimes seeing a 2.5x speed reduction using managed memory on the host, compared to using unmanaged memory. Dunno what's happening.

4   Stanford lectures

Last time, in lecture 4 we saw how to

1. cache data into shared memory for speed, and
2. use hierarchical sync.

Lecture 5 performance considerations shows how to fine tune your program once it's already working, if you need the extra speed.

Lecture 6 parallel patterns 1 presents some paradigms of parallel programming. These are generally useful building blocks for parallel algorithms.