
Chapter 3
Setting up the environment
Gilles Perrot
Femto-ST Institute, University of Franche-Comte, France
3.1 Data transfers, memory management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
3.2 Performance measurements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Image processing using a GPU often means using it as a general purpose com-
puting processor, which soon brings up the issue of data transfers, especially
when kernel runtime is fast and/or when large data sets are processed. The
truth is that, in certain cases, data transfers between GPU and CPU are slower
than the actual computation on GPU.