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AI Systems Performance Engineering
book

AI Systems Performance Engineering

by Chris Fregly
November 2025
Intermediate to advanced
1062 pages
34h 20m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from AI Systems Performance Engineering

Chapter 6. GPU Architecture, CUDA Programming, and Maximizing Occupancy

In this chapter, we’ll start by reviewing the single instruction, multiple-threads (SIMT) execution model and how warps, thread blocks, and grids map your GPU-based algorithms onto streaming multiprocessors (SMs).

We’ll review the SIMT execution model on modern NVIDIA GPUs, including how warps, thread blocks, and grids map to SMs. We’ll then dive into CUDA programming patterns, discuss the on-chip memory hierarchy (register file, shared/L1, L2, HBM3e), and demonstrate the GPUs asynchronous data transfer capabilities, including the Tensor Memory Accelerator (TMA) and the Tensor Memory (TMEM) that serves as the accumulator for Tensor Core operations.

We’ll also introduce roofline analysis to identify compute-bound versus memory-bound kernels. This will provide the fundamentals to push modern GPU systems toward their theoretical peak throughput ceilings.

Understanding GPU Architecture

Unlike CPUs, which optimize for low-latency single-thread performance, GPUs are throughput‐optimized processors built to run thousands of threads in parallel. A simple CUDA programming flow between the CPU and GPU is shown in Figure 6-1.

Diagram illustrating a simple CUDA programming flow between CPU and GPU, showing the sequence of loading data, copying to GPU, executing the kernel, copying results back, and using the results on the CPU.
Figure 6-1. Simple CUDA programming flow

Initially, the host loads data into CPU memory. It then copies the data from the CPU to the GPU memory. After calling the GPU kernel with the data in ...

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ISBN: 9798341627772Errata Page