Hands-On GPU Programming with Python and CUDA

The cuRAND device function library

Let's start with cuRAND. This is a standard CUDA library that is used for generating pseudo-random values within a CUDA kernel on a thread-by-thread basis, which is initialized and invoked by calling device functions from each individual thread within a kernel. Let's emphasize again that this is a pseudo-random sequence of values—since the digital hardware is always deterministic and never random or arbitrary, we use algorithms to generate a sequence of apparently random values from an initial seed value. Usually, we can set the seed value to a truly random value (such as the clock time in milliseconds), which will yield us with a nicely arbitrary sequence of random values. These generated random values ...