Hands-On GPU Programming with Python and CUDA

Summary

We started this chapter with a brief overview of the Python Ctypes library, which is used to interface directly with compiled binary code, and particularly dynamic libraries written in C/C++. We then looked at how to write a C-based wrapper with CUDA-C that launches a CUDA kernel, and then used this to indirectly launch our CUDA kernel from Python by writing an interface to this function with Ctypes. We then learned how to compile a CUDA kernel into a PTX module binary, which can be thought of as a DLL but with CUDA kernel functions, and saw how to load a PTX file and launch pre-compiled kernels with PyCUDA. Finally, we wrote a collection of Ctypes wrappers for the CUDA Driver API and saw how we can use these to perform basic GPU ...