Lecture X

In this video lecture, the presenter introduces CUDA, which stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture. CUDA is developed by NVIDIA as a computing platform for programming GPU cards. CUDA encompasses the programming language itself, which is a variant of C/C++, as well as the libraries and the GPU hardware. The lecture focuses on writing a simple CUDA code for vector addition. The presenter explains the steps involved in writing the code, including defining variables, allocating memory on both the host system and the GPU device, generating the values to be summed, transferring the data from the host to the device, launching the kernel (the operation to be executed), copying the results back to the host, performing result verification, and releasing the allocated memory. The presenter also provides an overview of the hierarchical structure of GPUs, which includse grids, blocks, and threads. The lecture concludes with a demonstration of compiling and executing the CUDA code using the NVCC compiler and a SLURM script.