R Deep Learning Cookbook

Comparing performance using CPU and GPU

One of the questions with device change is why so much improvement is observed when the device is switched from CPU to GPU. As the deep learning architecture involves a lot of matrix computations, GPUs help expedite these computations using a lot of parallel cores, which are usually used for image rendering.

The power of GPU has been utilized by a lot of algorithms to accelerate the execution. The following recipe provides some benchmarks of matrix computation using the gpuR package. The gpuR package is a general-purpose package for GPU computing in R.