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CUDA

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CUDA
Developer(s)Nvidia
Initial releaseFebruary 16, 2007; 17 years ago (2007-02-16)[1]
Stable release
12.8 / January 2025; 0 months ago (2025-01)
Operating systemWindows, Linux
PlatformSupported GPUs
TypeGPGPU
LicenseProprietary
Websitedeveloper.nvidia.com/cuda-zone

In computing, CUDA is a proprietary[2] parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for accelerated general-purpose processing, an approach called general-purpose computing on GPUs. CUDA was created by Nvidia in 2006.[3] When it was first introduced, the name was an acronym for Compute Unified Device Architecture,[4] but Nvidia later dropped the common use of the acronym and now rarely expands it.[5]

CUDA is a software layer that gives direct access to the GPU's virtual instruction set and parallel computational elements for the execution of compute kernels.[6] In addition to drivers and runtime kernels, the CUDA platform includes compilers, libraries and developer tools to help programmers accelerate their applications.

CUDA is designed to work with programming languages such as C, C++, Fortran and Python. This accessibility makes it easier for specialists in parallel programming to use GPU resources, in contrast to prior APIs like Direct3D and OpenGL, which require advanced skills in graphics programming.[7] CUDA-powered GPUs also support programming frameworks such as OpenMP, OpenACC and OpenCL.[8][6]

Background

[edit]

The graphics processing unit (GPU), as a specialized computer processor, addresses the demands of real-time high-resolution 3D graphics compute-intensive tasks. By 2012, GPUs had evolved into highly parallel multi-core systems allowing efficient manipulation of large blocks of data. This design is more effective than general-purpose central processing unit (CPUs) for algorithms in situations where processing large blocks of data is done in parallel, such as:

Ian Buck, while at Stanford in 2000, created an 8K gaming rig using 32 GeForce cards, then obtained a DARPA grant to perform general purpose parallel programming on GPUs. He then joined Nvidia, where since 2004 he has been overseeing CUDA development. In pushing for CUDA, Jensen Huang aimed for the Nvidia GPUs to become a general hardware for scientific computing. CUDA was released in 2007. Around 2015, the focus of CUDA changed to neural networks.[9]

Ontology

[edit]

The following table offers a non-exact description for the ontology of CUDA framework.

The ontology of CUDA framework
memory
(hardware)
memory (code, or variable scoping) computation
(hardware)
computation
(code syntax)
computation
(code semantics)
RAM non-CUDA variables host program one routine call
VRAM,
GPU L2 cache
global, const, texture device grid simultaneous call of the same subroutine on many processors
GPU L1 cache local, shared SM ("streaming multiprocessor") block individual subroutine call
warp = 32 threads SIMD instructions
GPU L0 cache,
register
thread (aka. "SP", "streaming processor", "cuda core", but these names are now deprecated) analogous to individual scalar ops within a vector op

Programming abilities

[edit]
Example of CUDA processing flow
  1. Copy data from main memory to GPU memory
  2. CPU initiates the GPU compute kernel
  3. GPU's CUDA cores execute the kernel in parallel
  4. Copy the resulting data from GPU memory to main memory

The CUDA platform is accessible to software developers through CUDA-accelerated libraries, compiler directives such as OpenACC, and extensions to industry-standard programming languages including C, C++, Fortran and Python. C/C++ programmers can use 'CUDA C/C++', compiled to PTX with nvcc, Nvidia's LLVM-based C/C++ compiler, or by clang itself.[10] Fortran programmers can use 'CUDA Fortran', compiled with the PGI CUDA Fortran compiler from The Portland Group.[needs update] Python programmers can use the cuNumeric library to accelerate applications on Nvidia GPUs.

In addition to libraries, compiler directives, CUDA C/C++ and CUDA Fortran, the CUDA platform supports other computational interfaces, including the Khronos Group's OpenCL,[11] Microsoft's DirectCompute, OpenGL Compute Shader and C++ AMP.[12] Third party wrappers are also available for Python, Perl, Fortran, Java, Ruby, Lua, Common Lisp, Haskell, R, MATLAB, IDL, Julia, and native support in Mathematica.

In the computer game industry, GPUs are used for graphics rendering, and for game physics calculations (physical effects such as debris, smoke, fire, fluids); examples include PhysX and Bullet. CUDA has also been used to accelerate non-graphical applications in computational biology, cryptography and other fields by an order of magnitude or more.[13][14][15][16][17]

CUDA provides both a low level API (CUDA Driver API, non single-source) and a higher level API (CUDA Runtime API, single-source). The initial CUDA SDK was made public on 15 February 2007, for Microsoft Windows and Linux. Mac OS X support was later added in version 2.0,[18] which supersedes the beta released February 14, 2008.[19] CUDA works with all Nvidia GPUs from the G8x series onwards, including GeForce, Quadro and the Tesla line. CUDA is compatible with most standard operating systems.

CUDA 8.0 comes with the following libraries (for compilation & runtime, in alphabetical order):

  • cuBLAS – CUDA Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines library
  • CUDART – CUDA Runtime library
  • cuFFT – CUDA Fast Fourier Transform library
  • cuRAND – CUDA Random Number Generation library
  • cuSOLVER – CUDA based collection of dense and sparse direct solvers
  • cuSPARSE – CUDA Sparse Matrix library
  • NPP – NVIDIA Performance Primitives library
  • nvGRAPH – NVIDIA Graph Analytics library
  • NVML – NVIDIA Management Library
  • NVRTC – NVIDIA Runtime Compilation library for CUDA C++

CUDA 8.0 comes with these other software components:

  • nView – NVIDIA nView Desktop Management Software
  • NVWMI – NVIDIA Enterprise Management Toolkit
  • GameWorks PhysX – is a multi-platform game physics engine

CUDA 9.0–9.2 comes with these other components:

  • CUTLASS 1.0 – custom linear algebra algorithms,
  • NVIDIA Video Decoder was deprecated in CUDA 9.2; it is now available in NVIDIA Video Codec SDK

CUDA 10 comes with these other components:

  • nvJPEG – Hybrid (CPU and GPU) JPEG processing

CUDA 11.0–11.8 comes with these other components:[20][21][22][23]

  • CUB is new one of more supported C++ libraries
  • MIG multi instance GPU support
  • nvJPEG2000 – JPEG 2000 encoder and decoder

Advantages

[edit]

CUDA has several advantages over traditional general-purpose computation on GPUs (GPGPU) using graphics APIs:

  • Scattered reads – code can read from arbitrary addresses in memory.
  • Unified virtual memory (CUDA 4.0 and above)
  • Unified memory (CUDA 6.0 and above)
  • Shared memory – CUDA exposes a fast shared memory region that can be shared among threads. This can be used as a user-managed cache, enabling higher bandwidth than is possible using texture lookups.[24]
  • Faster downloads and readbacks to and from the GPU
  • Full support for integer and bitwise operations, including integer texture lookups

Limitations

[edit]
  • Whether for the host computer or the GPU device, all CUDA source code is now processed according to C++ syntax rules.[25] This was not always the case. Earlier versions of CUDA were based on C syntax rules.[26] As with the more general case of compiling C code with a C++ compiler, it is therefore possible that old C-style CUDA source code will either fail to compile or will not behave as originally intended.
  • Interoperability with rendering languages such as OpenGL is one-way, with OpenGL having access to registered CUDA memory but CUDA not having access to OpenGL memory.
  • Copying between host and device memory may incur a performance hit due to system bus bandwidth and latency (this can be partly alleviated with asynchronous memory transfers, handled by the GPU's DMA engine).
  • Threads should be running in groups of at least 32 for best performance, with total number of threads numbering in the thousands. Branches in the program code do not affect performance significantly, provided that each of 32 threads takes the same execution path; the SIMD execution model becomes a significant limitation for any inherently divergent task (e.g. traversing a space partitioning data structure during ray tracing).
  • No emulation or fallback functionality is available for modern revisions.
  • Valid C++ may sometimes be flagged and prevent compilation due to the way the compiler approaches optimization for target GPU device limitations.[citation needed]
  • C++ run-time type information (RTTI) and C++-style exception handling are only supported in host code, not in device code.
  • In single-precision on first generation CUDA compute capability 1.x devices, denormal numbers are unsupported and are instead flushed to zero, and the precision of both the division and square root operations are slightly lower than IEEE 754-compliant single precision math. Devices that support compute capability 2.0 and above support denormal numbers, and the division and square root operations are IEEE 754 compliant by default. However, users can obtain the prior faster gaming-grade math of compute capability 1.x devices if desired by setting compiler flags to disable accurate divisions and accurate square roots, and enable flushing denormal numbers to zero.[27]
  • Unlike OpenCL, CUDA-enabled GPUs are only available from Nvidia as it is proprietary.[28][2] Attempts to implement CUDA on other GPUs include:
    • Project Coriander: Converts CUDA C++11 source to OpenCL 1.2 C. A fork of CUDA-on-CL intended to run TensorFlow.[29][30][31]
    • CU2CL: Convert CUDA 3.2 C++ to OpenCL C.[32]
    • GPUOpen HIP: A thin abstraction layer on top of CUDA and ROCm intended for AMD and Nvidia GPUs. Has a conversion tool for importing CUDA C++ source. Supports CUDA 4.0 plus C++11 and float16.
    • ZLUDA is a drop-in replacement for CUDA on AMD GPUs and formerly Intel GPUs with near-native performance.[33] The developer, Andrzej Janik, was separately contracted by both Intel and AMD to develop the software in 2021 and 2022, respectively. However, neither company decided to release it officially due to the lack of a business use case. AMD's contract included a clause that allowed Janik to release his code for AMD independently, allowing him to release the new version that only supports AMD GPUs.[34]
    • chipStar can compile and run CUDA/HIP programs on advanced OpenCL 3.0 or Level Zero platforms.[35]

Example

[edit]

This example code in C++ loads a texture from an image into an array on the GPU:

texture<float, 2, cudaReadModeElementType> tex;

void foo()
{
  cudaArray* cu_array;

  // Allocate array
  cudaChannelFormatDesc description = cudaCreateChannelDesc<float>();
  cudaMallocArray(&cu_array, &description, width, height);

  // Copy image data to array
  cudaMemcpyToArray(cu_array, image, width*height*sizeof(float), cudaMemcpyHostToDevice);

  // Set texture parameters (default)
  tex.addressMode[0] = cudaAddressModeClamp;
  tex.addressMode[1] = cudaAddressModeClamp;
  tex.filterMode = cudaFilterModePoint;
  tex.normalized = false; // do not normalize coordinates

  // Bind the array to the texture
  cudaBindTextureToArray(tex, cu_array);

  // Run kernel
  dim3 blockDim(16, 16, 1);
  dim3 gridDim((width + blockDim.x - 1)/ blockDim.x, (height + blockDim.y - 1) / blockDim.y, 1);
  kernel<<< gridDim, blockDim, 0 >>>(d_data, height, width);

  // Unbind the array from the texture
  cudaUnbindTexture(tex);
} //end foo()

__global__ void kernel(float* odata, int height, int width)
{
   unsigned int x = blockIdx.x*blockDim.x + threadIdx.x;
   unsigned int y = blockIdx.y*blockDim.y + threadIdx.y;
   if (x < width && y < height) {
      float c = tex2D(tex, x, y);
      odata[y*width+x] = c;
   }
}

Below is an example given in Python that computes the product of two arrays on the GPU. The unofficial Python language bindings can be obtained from PyCUDA.[36]

import pycuda.compiler as comp
import pycuda.driver as drv
import numpy
import pycuda.autoinit

mod = comp.SourceModule(
    """
__global__ void multiply_them(float *dest, float *a, float *b)
{
  const int i = threadIdx.x;
  dest[i] = a[i] * b[i];
}
"""
)

multiply_them = mod.get_function("multiply_them")

a = numpy.random.randn(400).astype(numpy.float32)
b = numpy.random.randn(400).astype(numpy.float32)

dest = numpy.zeros_like(a)
multiply_them(drv.Out(dest), drv.In(a), drv.In(b), block=(400, 1, 1))

print(dest - a * b)

Additional Python bindings to simplify matrix multiplication operations can be found in the program pycublas.[37]

 
import numpy
from pycublas import CUBLASMatrix

A = CUBLASMatrix(numpy.mat([[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6]], numpy.float32))
B = CUBLASMatrix(numpy.mat([[2, 3], [4, 5], [6, 7]], numpy.float32))
C = A * B
print(C.np_mat())

while CuPy directly replaces NumPy:[38]

import cupy

a = cupy.random.randn(400)
b = cupy.random.randn(400)

dest = cupy.zeros_like(a)

print(dest - a * b)

GPUs supported

[edit]

Supported CUDA compute capability versions for CUDA SDK version and microarchitecture (by code name):

Note: CUDA SDK 10.2 is the last official release for macOS, as support will not be available for macOS in newer releases.

CUDA compute capability by version with associated GPU semiconductors and GPU card models (separated by their various application areas):

* – OEM-only products

Version features and specifications

[edit]
Feature support (unlisted features are supported for all compute capabilities) Compute capability (version)
1.0, 1.1 1.2, 1.3 2.x 3.0 3.2 3.5, 3.7, 5.x, 6.x, 7.0, 7.2 7.5 8.x 9.0, 10.0, 10.1, 12.0
Warp vote functions (__all(), __any()) No Yes
Warp vote functions (__ballot()) No Yes
Memory fence functions (__threadfence_system())
Synchronization functions (__syncthreads_count(), __syncthreads_and(), __syncthreads_or())
Surface functions
3D grid of thread blocks
Warp shuffle functions No Yes
Unified memory programming
Funnel shift No Yes
Dynamic parallelism No Yes
Uniform Datapath[57] No Yes
Hardware-accelerated async-copy No Yes
Hardware-accelerated split arrive/wait barrier
Warp-level support for reduction ops
L2 cache residency management
DPX instructions for accelerated dynamic programming No Yes
Distributed shared memory
Thread block cluster
Tensor memory accelerator (TMA) unit
Feature support (unlisted features are supported for all compute capabilities) 1.0,1.1 1.2,1.3 2.x 3.0 3.2 3.5, 3.7, 5.x, 6.x, 7.0, 7.2 7.5 8.x 9.0, 10.0, 10.1, 12.0
Compute capability (version)

[58]

Data types

[edit]

Floating-point types

[edit]
Data type Supported vector types Storage Length Bits
(complete vector)
Used Length Bits
(single value)
Sign Bits Exponent Bits Mantissa Bits Comments
E2M1 = FP4 e2m1x2 / e2m1x4 8 / 16 4 1 2 1
E2M3 = FP6 variant e2m3x2 / e2m3x4 16 / 32 6 1 2 3
E3M2 = FP6 variant e3m2x2 / e3m2x4 16 / 32 6 1 3 2
UE4M3 ue4m3 8 7 0 4 3 Used for scaling (E2M1 only)
E4M3 = FP8 variant e4m3 / e4m3x2 / e4m3x4 8 / 16 / 32 8 1 4 3
E5M2 = FP8 variant e5m2 / e5m2x2 / e5m2x4 8 / 16 / 32 8 1 5 2 Exponent/range of FP16, fits into 8 bits
UE8M0 ue8m0x2 16 8 0 8 0 Used for scaling (any FP4 or FP6 or FP8 format)
FP16 f16 / f16x2 16 / 32 16 1 5 10
BF16 bf16 / bf16x2 16 / 32 16 1 8 7 Exponent/range of FP32, fits into 16 bits
TF32 tf32 32 19 1 8 10 Exponent/range of FP32, mantissa/precision of FP16
FP32 f32 / f32x2 32 / 64 32 1 8 23
FP64 f64 64 64 1 11 52

Version support

[edit]
Data type Basic Operations Supported since
Atomic Operations Supported since
for global memory
Supported since
for shared memory
8-bit integer
signed/unsigned
loading, storing, conversion 1.0
16-bit integer
signed/unsigned
general operations 1.0 atomicCAS() 3.5
32-bit integer
signed/unsigned
general operations 1.0 atomic functions 1.1 1.2
64-bit integer
signed/unsigned
general operations 1.0 atomic functions 1.2 2.0
any 128-bit trivially copyable type general operations No atomicExch, atomicCAS 9.0
16-bit floating point
FP16
addition, subtraction,
multiplication, comparison,
warp shuffle functions, conversion
5.3 half2 atomic addition 6.0
atomic addition 7.0
16-bit floating point
BF16
addition, subtraction,
multiplication, comparison,
warp shuffle functions, conversion
8.0 atomic addition 8.0
32-bit floating point general operations 1.0 atomicExch() 1.1 1.2
atomic addition 2.0
32-bit floating point float2 and float4 general operations No atomic addition 9.0
64-bit floating point general operations 1.3 atomic addition 6.0

Note: Any missing lines or empty entries do reflect some lack of information on that exact item.[59]

Tensor cores

[edit]
FMA per cycle per tensor core[60] Supported since 7.0 7.2 7.5 Workstation 7.5 Desktop 8.0 8.6 Workstation 8.7 8.6 Desktop 8.9 Desktop 8.9 Workstation 9.0 10.0 10.1 12.0
Data Type For dense matrices For sparse matrices 1st Gen (8x/SM) 1st Gen? (8x/SM) 2nd Gen (8x/SM) 3rd Gen (4x/SM) 4th Gen (4x/SM) 5th Gen (4x/SM)
1-bit values (AND) 8.0 as
experimental
No No 4096 2048 speed tbd
1-bit values (XOR) 7.5–8.9 as
experimental
No 1024 Deprecated or removed?
4-bit integers 8.0–8.9 as
experimental
256 1024 512
4-bit floating point FP4 (E2M1) 10.0 No 4096 tbd 512
6-bit floating point FP6 (E3M2 and E2M3) 10.0 No 2048 tbd
8-bit integers 7.2 8.0 No 128 128 512 256 1024 2048 256
8-bit floating point FP8 (E4M3 and E5M2) with FP16 accumulate 8.9 No 256
8-bit floating point FP8 (E4M3 and E5M2) with FP32 accumulate 128 128
16-bit floating point FP16 with FP16 accumulate 7.0 8.0 64 64 64 256 128 512 1024 128
16-bit floating point FP16 with FP32 accumulate 32 64 128 64
16-bit floating point BF16 with FP32 accumulate 7.5[61] 8.0 No 64[62]
32-bit (19 bits used) floating point TF32 speed tbd (32?)[62] 128 32 64 256 512 32
64-bit floating point 8.0 No No 16 speed tbd 32 16 tbd

Note: Any missing lines or empty entries do reflect some lack of information on that exact item.[63][64] [65] [66] [67] [68]

Tensor Core Composition 7.0 7.2, 7.5 8.0, 8.6 8.7 8.9 9.0
Dot Product Unit Width in FP16 units (in bytes)[69][70][71][72] 4 (8) 8 (16) 4 (8) 16 (32)
Dot Product Units per Tensor Core 16 32
Tensor Cores per SM partition 2 1
Full throughput (Bytes/cycle)[73] per SM partition[74] 256 512 256 1024
FP Tensor Cores: Minimum cycles for warp-wide matrix calculation 8 4 8
FP Tensor Cores: Minimum Matrix Shape for full throughput (Bytes)[75] 2048
INT Tensor Cores: Minimum cycles for warp-wide matrix calculation No 4
INT Tensor Cores: Minimum Matrix Shape for full throughput (Bytes) No 1024 2048 1024

[76][77][78][79]

FP64 Tensor Core Composition 8.0 8.6 8.7 8.9 9.0
Dot Product Unit Width in FP64 units (in bytes) 4 (32) tbd 4 (32)
Dot Product Units per Tensor Core 4 tbd 8
Tensor Cores per SM partition 1
Full throughput (Bytes/cycle)[73] per SM partition[74] 128 tbd 256
Minimum cycles for warp-wide matrix calculation 16 tbd
Minimum Matrix Shape for full throughput (Bytes)[75] 2048

Technical specification

[edit]
Technical specifications Compute capability (version)
1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 2.x 3.0 3.2 3.5 3.7 5.0 5.2 5.3 6.0 6.1 6.2 7.0 7.2 7.5 8.0 8.6 8.7 8.9 9.0 10.x 12.0
Maximum number of resident grids per device
(concurrent kernel execution, can be lower for specific devices)
1 16 4 32 16 128 32 16 128 16 128
Maximum dimensionality of grid of thread blocks 2 3
Maximum x-dimension of a grid of thread blocks 65535 231 − 1
Maximum y-, or z-dimension of a grid of thread blocks 65535
Maximum dimensionality of thread block 3
Maximum x- or y-dimension of a block 512 1024
Maximum z-dimension of a block 64
Maximum number of threads per block 512 1024
Warp size 32
Maximum number of resident blocks per multiprocessor 8 16 32 16 32 16 24 32
Maximum number of resident warps per multiprocessor 24 32 48 64 32 64 48 64 48
Maximum number of resident threads per multiprocessor 768 1024 1536 2048 1024 2048 1536 2048 1536
Number of 32-bit regular registers per multiprocessor 8 K 16 K 32 K 64 K 128 K 64 K
Number of 32-bit uniform registers per multiprocessor No 2 K[80]

[81]

Maximum number of 32-bit registers per thread block 8 K 16 K 32 K 64 K 32 K 64 K 32 K 64 K 32 K 64 K
Maximum number of 32-bit regular registers per thread 124 63 255
Maximum number of 32-bit uniform registers per warp No 63[80]

[82]

Amount of shared memory per multiprocessor
(out of overall shared memory + L1 cache, where applicable)
16 KiB 16 / 48 KiB (of 64 KiB) 16 / 32 / 48 KiB (of 64 KiB) 80 / 96 / 112 KiB (of 128 KiB) 64 KiB 96 KiB 64 KiB 96 KiB 64 KiB 0 / 8 / 16 / 32 / 64 / 96 KiB (of 128 KiB) 32 / 64 KiB (of 96 KiB) 0 / 8 / 16 / 32 / 64 / 100 / 132 / 164 KiB (of 192 KiB) 0 / 8 / 16 / 32 / 64 / 100 KiB (of 128 KiB) 0 / 8 / 16 / 32 / 64 / 100 / 132 / 164 KiB (of 192 KiB) 0 / 8 / 16 / 32 / 64 / 100 KiB (of 128 KiB) 0 / 8 / 16 / 32 / 64 / 100 / 132 / 164 / 196 / 228 KiB (of 256 KiB) 0 / 8 / 16 / 32 / 64 / 100 KiB (of 128 KiB)
Maximum amount of shared memory per thread block 16 KiB 48 KiB 96 KiB 48 KiB 64 KiB 163 KiB 99 KiB 163 KiB 99 KiB 227 KiB 99 KiB
Number of shared memory banks 16 32
Amount of local memory per thread 16 KiB 512 KiB
Constant memory size accessible by CUDA C/C++
(1 bank, PTX can access 11 banks, SASS can access 18 banks)
64 KiB
Cache working set per multiprocessor for constant memory 8 KiB 4 KiB 8 KiB
Cache working set per multiprocessor for texture memory 16 KiB per TPC 24 KiB per TPC 12 KiB 12 – 48 KiB[83] 24 KiB 48 KiB 32 KiB[84] 24 KiB 48 KiB 24 KiB 32 – 128 KiB 32 – 64 KiB 28 – 192 KiB 28 – 128 KiB 28 – 192 KiB 28 – 128 KiB 28 – 256 KiB
Maximum width for 1D texture reference bound to a CUDA
array
8192 65536 131072
Maximum width for 1D texture reference bound to linear
memory
227 228 227 228 227 228
Maximum width and number of layers for a 1D layered
texture reference
8192 × 512 16384 × 2048 32768 x 2048
Maximum width and height for 2D texture reference bound
to a CUDA array
65536 × 32768 65536 × 65535 131072 x 65536
Maximum width and height for 2D texture reference bound
to a linear memory
65000 x 65000 65536 x 65536 131072 x 65000
Maximum width and height for 2D texture reference bound
to a CUDA array supporting texture gather
16384 x 16384 32768 x 32768
Maximum width, height, and number of layers for a 2D
layered texture reference
8192 × 8192 × 512 16384 × 16384 × 2048 32768 x 32768 x 2048
Maximum width, height and depth for a 3D texture
reference bound to linear memory or a CUDA array
20483 40963 163843
Maximum width (and height) for a cubemap texture reference 16384 32768
Maximum width (and height) and number of layers
for a cubemap layered texture reference
16384 × 2046 32768 × 2046
Maximum number of textures that can be bound to a
kernel
128 256
Maximum width for a 1D surface reference bound to a
CUDA array
Not
supported
65536 16384 32768
Maximum width and number of layers for a 1D layered
surface reference
65536 × 2048 16384 × 2048 32768 × 2048
Maximum width and height for a 2D surface reference
bound to a CUDA array
65536 × 32768 16384 × 65536 131072 × 65536
Maximum width, height, and number of layers for a 2D
layered surface reference
65536 × 32768 × 2048 16384 × 16384 × 2048 32768 × 32768 × 2048
Maximum width, height, and depth for a 3D surface
reference bound to a CUDA array
65536 × 32768 × 2048 4096 × 4096 × 4096 16384 × 16384 × 16384
Maximum width (and height) for a cubemap surface reference bound to a CUDA array 32768 16384 32768
Maximum width and number of layers for a cubemap
layered surface reference
32768 × 2046 16384 × 2046 32768 × 2046
Maximum number of surfaces that can be bound to a
kernel
8 16 32
Maximum number of instructions per kernel 2 million 512 million
Maximum number of Thread Blocks per Thread Block Cluster[85] No 16 8
Technical specifications 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 2.x 3.0 3.2 3.5 3.7 5.0 5.2 5.3 6.0 6.1 6.2 7.0 7.2 7.5 8.0 8.6 8.7 8.9 9.0 10.x 12.0
Compute capability (version)
[86]

[87]

Multiprocessor architecture

[edit]
Architecture specifications Compute capability (version)
1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 2.0 2.1 3.0 3.2 3.5 3.7 5.0 5.2 5.3 6.0 6.1 6.2 7.0 7.2 7.5 8.0 8.6 8.7 8.9 9.0 10.x 12.0
Number of ALU lanes for INT32 arithmetic operations 8 32 48 192[88] 128 128 64 128 128 64 64 64 128
Number of ALU lanes for any INT32 or FP32 arithmetic operation
Number of ALU lanes for FP32 arithmetic operations 64 64 128 128
Number of ALU lanes for FP16x2 arithmetic operations No 1 128[89] 128[90] 64[91]
Number of ALU lanes for FP64 arithmetic operations No 1 16 by FP32[92] 4 by FP32[93] 8 8 / 64[94] 64 4[95] 32 4 32 2 32 2 2? 2 64 2
Number of Load/Store Units 4 per 2 SM 8 per 2 SM 8 per 2 SM / 3 SM[94] 8 per 3 SM 16 32 16 32 16 32
Number of special function units for single-precision floating-point transcendental functions 2[96] 4 8 32 16 32 16
Number of texture mapping units (TMU) 4 per 2 SM 8 per 2 SM 8 per 2 / 3SM[94] 8 per 3 SM 4 4 / 8[94] 16 8 16 8 4
Number of ALU lanes for uniform INT32 arithmetic operations No 2[97]
Number of tensor cores No 8 (1st gen.)[98] 0 / 8[94] (2nd gen.) 4 (3rd gen.) 4 (4th gen.)
Number of raytracing cores No 0 / 1[94] (1st gen.) No 1 (2nd gen.) No 1 (3rd gen.) No
Number of SM Partitions = Processing Blocks[99] 1 4 2 4
Number of warp schedulers per SM partition 1 2 4 1
Max number of new instructions issued each cycle by a single scheduler[100] 2[101] 1 2[102] 2 1
Size of unified memory for data cache and shared memory 16 KiB[103] 16 KiB[103] 64 KiB 128 KiB 64 KiB SM + 24 KiB L1 (separate)[104] 96 KiB SM + 24 KiB L1 (separate)[104] 64 KiB SM + 24 KiB L1 (separate)[104] 64 KiB SM + 24 KiB L1 (separate)[104] 96 KiB SM + 24 KiB L1 (separate)[104] 64 KiB SM + 24 KiB L1 (separate)[104] 128 KiB 96 KiB[105] 192 KiB 128 KiB 192 KiB 128 KiB 256 KiB
Size of L3 instruction cache per GPU 32 KiB[106] use L2 Data Cache
Size of L2 instruction cache per Texture Processor Cluster (TPC) 8 KiB
Size of L1.5 instruction cache per SM[107] 4 KiB 32 KiB 32 KiB 48 KiB[84] 128 KiB 32 KiB 128 KiB ~46 KiB[108] 128 KiB[109]
Size of L1 instruction cache per SM 8 KiB 8 KiB
Size of L0 instruction cache per SM partition only 1 partition per SM No 12 KiB 16 KiB?[110] 32 KiB
Instruction Width[107] 32 bits instructions and 64 bits instructions[111] 64 bits instructions + 64 bits control logic every 7 instructions 64 bits instructions + 64 bits control logic every 3 instructions 128 bits combined instruction and control logic
Memory Bus Width per Memory Partition in bits 64 ((G)DDR) 32 ((G)DDR) 512 (HBM) 32 ((G)DDR) 512 (HBM) 32 ((G)DDR) 512 (HBM) 32 ((G)DDR) 512 (HBM) 32 ((G)DDR)
L2 Cache per Memory Partition 16 KiB[112] 32 KiB[112] 128 KiB 256 KiB 1 MiB 512 KiB 128 KiB 512 KiB 256 KiB 128 KiB 768 KiB 64 KiB 512 KiB 4 MiB 512 KiB 8 MiB[113] 5 MiB 6.25 MiB 8 MiB[114]
Number of Render Output Units (ROP) per memory partition (or per GPC in later models) 4 8 4 8 16 8 12 8 4 16 2 8 16 16 per GPC 3 per GPC 16 per GPC
Architecture specifications 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 2.0 2.1 3.0 3.2 3.5 3.7 5.0 5.2 5.3 6.0 6.1 6.2 7.0 7.2 7.5 8.0 8.6 8.7 8.9 9.0 10.x 12.0
Compute capability (version)
[115]

For more information read the Nvidia CUDA programming guide.[116]

Current and future usages of CUDA architecture

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Comparison with competitors

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CUDA competes with other GPU computing stacks: Intel OneAPI and AMD ROCm.

Whereas Nvidia's CUDA is closed-source, Intel's OneAPI and AMD's ROCm are open source.

Intel OneAPI

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oneAPI is an initiative based in open standards, created to support software development for multiple hardware architectures.[119] The oneAPI libraries must implement open specifications that are discussed publicly by the Special Interest Groups, offering the possibility for any developer or organization to implement their own versions of oneAPI libraries.[120][121]

Originally made by Intel, other hardware adopters include Fujitsu and Huawei.

Unified Acceleration Foundation (UXL)

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Unified Acceleration Foundation (UXL) is a new technology consortium working on the continuation of the OneAPI initiative, with the goal to create a new open standard accelerator software ecosystem, related open standards and specification projects through Working Groups and Special Interest Groups (SIGs). The goal is to offer open alternatives to Nvidia's CUDA. The main companies behind it are Intel, Google, ARM, Qualcomm, Samsung, Imagination, and VMware.[122]

AMD ROCm

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ROCm[123] is an open source software stack for graphics processing unit (GPU) programming from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

See also

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References

[edit]
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  2. ^ a b Shah, Agam. "Nvidia not totally against third parties making CUDA chips". www.theregister.com. Retrieved 2024-04-25.
  3. ^ "Nvidia CUDA Home Page". 18 July 2017.
  4. ^ Shimpi, Anand Lal; Wilson, Derek (November 8, 2006). "Nvidia's GeForce 8800 (G80): GPUs Re-architected for DirectX 10". AnandTech. Retrieved May 16, 2015.
  5. ^ "Introduction — nsight-visual-studio-edition 12.6 documentation". docs.nvidia.com. Retrieved 2024-10-10.
  6. ^ a b Abi-Chahla, Fedy (June 18, 2008). "Nvidia's CUDA: The End of the CPU?". Tom's Hardware. Retrieved May 17, 2015.
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  8. ^ "OpenCL". NVIDIA Developer. 2013-04-24. Retrieved 2019-11-04.
  9. ^ Witt, Stephen (2023-11-27). "How Jensen Huang's Nvidia Is Powering the A.I. Revolution". The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X. Retrieved 2023-12-10.
  10. ^ "CUDA LLVM Compiler". 7 May 2012.
  11. ^ First OpenCL demo on a GPU on YouTube
  12. ^ DirectCompute Ocean Demo Running on Nvidia CUDA-enabled GPU on YouTube
  13. ^ Vasiliadis, Giorgos; Antonatos, Spiros; Polychronakis, Michalis; Markatos, Evangelos P.; Ioannidis, Sotiris (September 2008). "Gnort: High Performance Network Intrusion Detection Using Graphics Processors" (PDF). Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 5230. pp. 116–134. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-87403-4_7. ISBN 978-3-540-87402-7.
  14. ^ Schatz, Michael C.; Trapnell, Cole; Delcher, Arthur L.; Varshney, Amitabh (2007). "High-throughput sequence alignment using Graphics Processing Units". BMC Bioinformatics. 8: 474. doi:10.1186/1471-2105-8-474. PMC 2222658. PMID 18070356.
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  23. ^ "Exploring the New Features of CUDA 11.3". 16 April 2021.
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  33. ^ "GitHub – vosen/ZLUDA". GitHub.
  34. ^ Larabel, Michael (2024-02-12), "AMD Quietly Funded A Drop-In CUDA Implementation Built On ROCm: It's Now Open-Source", Phoronix, retrieved 2024-02-12
  35. ^ "GitHub – chip-spv/chipStar". GitHub.
  36. ^ "PyCUDA".
  37. ^ "pycublas". Archived from the original on 2009-04-20. Retrieved 2017-08-08.
  38. ^ "CuPy". Retrieved 2020-01-08.
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  40. ^ "NVIDIA CUDA Programming Guide. Version 2.1" (PDF). December 8, 2008.
  41. ^ "NVIDIA CUDA Programming Guide. Version 2.2" (PDF). April 2, 2009.
  42. ^ "NVIDIA CUDA Programming Guide. Version 2.2.1" (PDF). May 26, 2009.
  43. ^ "NVIDIA CUDA Programming Guide. Version 2.3.1" (PDF). August 26, 2009.
  44. ^ "NVIDIA CUDA Programming Guide. Version 3.0" (PDF). February 20, 2010.
  45. ^ "NVIDIA CUDA C Programming Guide. Version 3.1.1" (PDF). July 21, 2010.
  46. ^ "NVIDIA CUDA C Programming Guide. Version 3.2" (PDF). November 9, 2010.
  47. ^ "CUDA 11.0 Release Notes". NVIDIA Developer.
  48. ^ "CUDA 11.1 Release Notes". NVIDIA Developer.
  49. ^ "CUDA 11.5 Release Notes". NVIDIA Developer.
  50. ^ "CUDA 11.8 Release Notes". NVIDIA Developer.
  51. ^ "NVIDIA Quadro NVS 420 Specs". TechPowerUp GPU Database. 25 August 2023.
  52. ^ Larabel, Michael (March 29, 2017). "NVIDIA Rolls Out Tegra X2 GPU Support In Nouveau". Phoronix. Retrieved August 8, 2017.
  53. ^ Nvidia Xavier Specs on TechPowerUp (preliminary)
  54. ^ "Welcome — Jetson LinuxDeveloper Guide 34.1 documentation".
  55. ^ "NVIDIA Bringing up Open-Source Volta GPU Support for Their Xavier SoC".
  56. ^ "NVIDIA Ada Lovelace Architecture".
  57. ^ Dissecting the Turing GPU Architecture through Microbenchmarking
  58. ^ "H.1. Features and Technical Specifications – Table 13. Feature Support per Compute Capability". docs.nvidia.com. Retrieved 2020-09-23.
  59. ^ "CUDA C++ Programming Guide".
  60. ^ Fused-Multiply-Add, actually executed, Dense Matrix
  61. ^ as SASS since 7.5, as PTX since 8.0
  62. ^ a b unofficial support in SASS
  63. ^ "Technical brief. NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin Series" (PDF). nvidia.com. Retrieved 5 September 2023.
  64. ^ "NVIDIA Ampere GA102 GPU Architecture" (PDF). nvidia.com. Retrieved 5 September 2023.
  65. ^ Luo, Weile; Fan, Ruibo; Li, Zeyu; Du, Dayou; Wang, Qiang; Chu, Xiaowen (2024). "Benchmarking and Dissecting the Nvidia Hopper GPU Architecture". arXiv:2402.13499v1 [cs.AR].
  66. ^ "Datasheet NVIDIA A40" (PDF). nvidia.com. Retrieved 27 April 2024.
  67. ^ "NVIDIA AMPERE GA102 GPU ARCHITECTURE" (PDF). 27 April 2024.
  68. ^ "Datasheet NVIDIA L40" (PDF). 27 April 2024.
  69. ^ In the Whitepapers the Tensor Core cube diagrams represent the Dot Product Unit Width into the height (4 FP16 for Volta and Turing, 8 FP16 for A100, 4 FP16 for GA102, 16 FP16 for GH100). The other two dimensions represent the number of Dot Product Units (4x4 = 16 for Volta and Turing, 8x4 = 32 for Ampere and Hopper). The resulting gray blocks are the FP16 FMA operations per cycle. Pascal without Tensor core is only shown for speed comparison as is Volta V100 with non-FP16 datatypes.
  70. ^ "NVIDIA Turing Architecture Whitepaper" (PDF). nvidia.com. Retrieved 5 September 2023.
  71. ^ "NVIDIA Tensor Core GPU" (PDF). nvidia.com. Retrieved 5 September 2023.
  72. ^ "NVIDIA Hopper Architecture In-Depth". 22 March 2022.
  73. ^ a b shape x converted operand size, e.g. 2 tensor cores x 4x4x4xFP16/cycle = 256 Bytes/cycle
  74. ^ a b = product first 3 table rows
  75. ^ a b = product of previous 2 table rows; shape: e.g. 8x8x4xFP16 = 512 Bytes
  76. ^ Sun, Wei; Li, Ang; Geng, Tong; Stuijk, Sander; Corporaal, Henk (2023). "Dissecting Tensor Cores via Microbenchmarks: Latency, Throughput and Numeric Behaviors". IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. 34 (1): 246–261. arXiv:2206.02874. doi:10.1109/tpds.2022.3217824. S2CID 249431357.
  77. ^ "Parallel Thread Execution ISA Version 7.7".
  78. ^ Raihan, Md Aamir; Goli, Negar; Aamodt, Tor (2018). "Modeling Deep Learning Accelerator Enabled GPUs". arXiv:1811.08309 [cs.MS].
  79. ^ "NVIDIA Ada Lovelace Architecture".
  80. ^ a b Jia, Zhe; Maggioni, Marco; Smith, Jeffrey; Daniele Paolo Scarpazza (2019). "Dissecting the NVidia Turing T4 GPU via Microbenchmarking". arXiv:1903.07486 [cs.DC].
  81. ^ Burgess, John (2019). "RTX ON – The NVIDIA TURING GPU". 2019 IEEE Hot Chips 31 Symposium (HCS). pp. 1–27. doi:10.1109/HOTCHIPS.2019.8875651. ISBN 978-1-7281-2089-8. S2CID 204822166.
  82. ^ Burgess, John (2019). "RTX ON – The NVIDIA TURING GPU". 2019 IEEE Hot Chips 31 Symposium (HCS). pp. 1–27. doi:10.1109/HOTCHIPS.2019.8875651. ISBN 978-1-7281-2089-8. S2CID 204822166.
  83. ^ dependent on device
  84. ^ a b "Tegra X1". 9 January 2015.
  85. ^ NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU Architecture
  86. ^ H.1. Features and Technical Specifications – Table 14. Technical Specifications per Compute Capability
  87. ^ NVIDIA Hopper Architecture In-Depth
  88. ^ can only execute 160 integer instructions according to programming guide
  89. ^ 128 according to [1]. 64 from FP32 + 64 separate units?
  90. ^ 64 by FP32 cores and 64 by flexible FP32/INT cores.
  91. ^ "CUDA C++ Programming Guide".
  92. ^ 32 FP32 lanes combine to 16 FP64 lanes. Maybe lower depending on model.
  93. ^ only supported by 16 FP32 lanes, they combine to 4 FP64 lanes
  94. ^ a b c d e f depending on model
  95. ^ Effective speed, probably over FP32 ports. No description of actual FP64 cores.
  96. ^ Can also be used for integer additions and comparisons
  97. ^ 2 clock cycles/instruction for each SM partition Burgess, John (2019). "RTX ON – The NVIDIA TURING GPU". 2019 IEEE Hot Chips 31 Symposium (HCS). pp. 1–27. doi:10.1109/HOTCHIPS.2019.8875651. ISBN 978-1-7281-2089-8. S2CID 204822166.
  98. ^ Durant, Luke; Giroux, Olivier; Harris, Mark; Stam, Nick (May 10, 2017). "Inside Volta: The World's Most Advanced Data Center GPU". Nvidia developer blog.
  99. ^ The schedulers and dispatchers have dedicated execution units unlike with Fermi and Kepler.
  100. ^ Dispatching can overlap concurrently, if it takes more than one cycle (when there are less execution units than 32/SM Partition)
  101. ^ Can dual issue MAD pipe and SFU pipe
  102. ^ No more than one scheduler can issue 2 instructions at once. The first scheduler is in charge of warps with odd IDs. The second scheduler is in charge of warps with even IDs.
  103. ^ a b shared memory only, no data cache
  104. ^ a b c d e f shared memory separate, but L1 includes texture cache
  105. ^ "H.6.1. Architecture". docs.nvidia.com. Retrieved 2019-05-13.
  106. ^ "Demystifying GPU Microarchitecture through Microbenchmarking" (PDF).
  107. ^ a b Jia, Zhe; Maggioni, Marco; Staiger, Benjamin; Scarpazza, Daniele P. (2018). "Dissecting the NVIDIA Volta GPU Architecture via Microbenchmarking". arXiv:1804.06826 [cs.DC].
  108. ^ Jia, Zhe; Maggioni, Marco; Smith, Jeffrey; Daniele Paolo Scarpazza (2019). "Dissecting the NVidia Turing T4 GPU via Microbenchmarking". arXiv:1903.07486 [cs.DC].
  109. ^ "Dissecting the Ampere GPU Architecture through Microbenchmarking".
  110. ^ Note that Jia, Zhe; Maggioni, Marco; Smith, Jeffrey; Daniele Paolo Scarpazza (2019). "Dissecting the NVidia Turing T4 GPU via Microbenchmarking". arXiv:1903.07486 [cs.DC]. disagrees and states 2 KiB L0 instruction cache per SM partition and 16 KiB L1 instruction cache per SM
  111. ^ "asfermi Opcode". GitHub.
  112. ^ a b for access with texture engine only
  113. ^ 25% disabled on RTX 4060, RTX 4070, RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 4090
  114. ^ 25% disabled on RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5090
  115. ^ "I.7. Compute Capability 8.x". docs.nvidia.com. Retrieved 2022-10-12.
  116. ^ "Appendix F. Features and Technical Specifications" (PDF). (3.2 MiB), page 148 of 175 (Version 5.0 October 2012).
  117. ^ "nVidia CUDA Bioinformatics: BarraCUDA". BioCentric. 2019-07-19. Retrieved 2019-10-15.
  118. ^ "Part V: Physics Simulation". NVIDIA Developer. Retrieved 2020-09-11.
  119. ^ "oneAPI Programming Model". oneAPI.io. Retrieved 2024-07-27.
  120. ^ "Specifications | oneAPI". oneAPI.io. Retrieved 2024-07-27.
  121. ^ "oneAPI Specification — oneAPI Specification 1.3-rev-1 documentation". oneapi-spec.uxlfoundation.org. Retrieved 2024-07-27.
  122. ^ "Exclusive: Behind the plot to break Nvidia's grip on AI by targeting software". Reuters. Retrieved 2024-04-05.
  123. ^ "Question: What does ROCm stand for? · Issue #1628 · RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm". Github.com. Retrieved January 18, 2022.

Further reading

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