GPU with CUDA 20 & 21 May 2025

Nowadays the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is a mainstream hardware component in high-performance computing. For affordable budgets anyone can harness supercomputer performance. However, realizing efficient parallelism combines three knowledge areas: firstly, on the architecture and compute capabilities of the GPUs;  then, on special constructs for programming a GPU-equipped computer; finally, on the special algorithms for performing logical and mathematical operations in parallel.

What is CUDA? 

CUDA stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture.  It is a software-development tool kit for programming on the GPUs maintained by the mainstream manufacturer Nvidia. CUDA provides language extensions for C, C++, FORTRAN, and Python as well as knowledge-specific libraries. A single source code is then able to instruct the CPU and GPU alike. Also, CUDA-extended codes keep pace closely with the rapid developments in the underlying technology.

Goals and prerequisites

To guide you in this development niche, the Delft Institute for Computational Science and Engineering (DCSE) offers a CUDA course every quarter. We will explain basic principles and advanced topics on GPU programming with CUDA. You will apply these notions in our labroom with hands-on examples. After this course you will be able to get simple CUDA programs running on a GPU-equipped computer.
As prerequisite, a rudimentary understanding of programming languages like C++ or Java is ideal; that of Fortran or Python will be helpful too. Some interest in linear algebra and iterative solvers is a little advantage.