Hands-On GPU Programming with Python and CUDA

Basic pointwise arithmetic operations with gpuarray

In the last example, we saw that we can use the (overloaded) Python multiplication operator (* ) to multiply each element in a gpuarray object by a scalar value (here it was 2); note that a pointwise operation is intrinsically parallelizable, and so when we use this operation on a gpuarray object PyCUDA is able to offload each multiplication operation onto a single thread, rather than computing each multiplication in serial, one after the other (in fairness, some versions of NumPy can use the advanced SSE instructions found in modern x86 chips for these computations, so in some cases the performance will be comparable to a GPU). To be clear: these pointwise operations performed on the GPU ...