News this week of a new textbook aimed at teaching students how to program GPUs. The book is written by David Kirk, NVIDIA Fellow and former chief scientist, and Wen-mei Hwu, Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UIUC.
With conventional CPU-based computing no longer scaling in performance and the world’s computational challenges increasing in complexity, the need for massively parallel processing has never been greater. GPUs have hundreds of cores capable of delivering transformative performance increases across a wide range of computational challenges. The rise of these multi-core architectures has raised the need to teach advanced programmers a new and essential skill: how to program massively parallel processors.
..Among the book’s key features:
- First and only text that teaches how to program within a massively parallel environment
- Portions of the NVIDIA-provided content have been part of the curriculum at 300 universities worldwide
- Drafts of sections of the book have been tested and taught by Kirk at the University of Illinois
- Book utilizes OpenCL and CUDA C, the NVIDIA parallel computing language developed specifically for massively parallel environments
More information in the release, or at the book’s website.