Praise for GPU Computing Gems: Emerald Edition: "GPU computing is becoming an outstanding field in high performance computing. Due to its easiness, the CUDA approach enables programmers to take advantage of GPU-acceleration very quickly. My research in complex science as well as applications in high frequency trading benefited significantly from GPU computing." - Dr. Tobias Preis, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
"This book is an important reference for everyone working on GPU/CUDA, and contains definitive work in a selection of fields. The patterns of CUDA parallelization it describes can often be adapted to applications in other fields." - Dr. Ming Ouyang, Assistant Professor - Director Visualization and Intensive Graphics Lab, University of Louisville
"Diving into the world of GPU computing has never been more important these days. GPU Computing Gems: Emerald Edition takes you through the looking glass into this fascinating world." - Martin Eisemann, Computer Graphics Lab, TU Braunschweig
".an outstanding collection of vignettes of how to program GPUs for a breathtaking range of applications." - Dr. Amitabh Varshney, Director, Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland
Customer Reviews & Comments
I have to agree with H. Nguyen. This book is a missed opportunity. GPGPU computing is new for programmers and barely even known by scientists. The entries in this book don't really show sophisticated GPGPU philosophy or idioms. You won't read this and have "aha" moments. It would be nice if the text focused on advanced uses of segmented scan (the central trick in GPGPU computing) for load balancing and allocation, and helped the reader develop a toolbox for writing their own kernels. What's really needed is a GPU replacement for basic computer science texts like Sedgewick et. al. Just learning how to add up numbers, write a sort, write a sparse matrix code, etc, near peak efficiency of the device, is a great learning experience, because you learn to think with cooperative thread array logic rather than imperative logic. Until you master that, it's not possible to write efficient GPU code. I give the contributors credit for the articles, but I think the editorship made a mistake by not giving the book a clearer and more narrow focus. Hopefully there will soon be a book that tackles ten can't-live-without algorithms and covers them in very fine detail, addressing all performance aspects of the code and showing how coupled it is to device architecture.
On the other hand I'm giving the book a second star because it does let the reader know there are others using GPGPU to solve science problems, and the topics are pretty interesting, even if the implementations are not in the GPU idiom.
The best references are still the technical docs from NVIDIA and ATI (you should read both vendor's docs even if you only deal with CUDA, as extra perspective helps), the CUDA technical forum, and the handful of research papers written by good GPGPU coders (many who work at NV now).
