Chapter 1

Introduction

Abstract

After a short discussion of the history of parallel computation on graphics processing units, or GPUs, this chapter goes through a sequence of simple examples that illustrate the fundamental aspects of computation on GPUs using CUDA Fortran. The hybrid nature of CUDA Fortran programming is illustrated, which contains both host code that is run on the CPU and device code that is executed on the GPU. Ways to determine hardware features and capabilities from within CUDA Fortran code are presented, as are error handling, compilation of CUDA Fortran code, and system management.

Keywords

Data parallelism; Hybrid computation; Host and device code; Kernel; Execution configuration; Compute capability; Error handling; Compilation; ...

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