Workshop: Accelerating CUDA C++ Applications with Multiple GPUs

Wednesday 11 Sept 2024, 10:00 → 18:00 Europe/Ljubljana

MS Teams

Domen Verber, Jani Dugonik

Description: This workshop covers how to write CUDA C++ applications that efficiently and correctly utilize all available GPUs in a single node, dramatically improving the performance of your applications and making the most cost-effective use of systems with multiple GPUs. 

Computationally intensive CUDA® C++ applications in high-performance computing, data science, bioinformatics, and deep learning can be accelerated by using multiple GPUs, which can increase throughput and/or decrease your total runtime. When combined with the concurrent overlap of computation and memory transfers, computation can be scaled across multiple GPUs without increasing the cost of memory transfers. For organizations with multi-GPU servers, whether in the cloud or on NVIDIA DGX™ systems, these techniques enable you to achieve peak performance from GPU-accelerated applications. And it’s important to implement these single-node, multi-GPU techniques before scaling your applications across multiple nodes.

At the end of the workshop, participants can obtain an official certificate from Deep Learning Institute from NVIDIA.

Workflow: The workshop takes place remotely via a browser on the AWS cloud infrastructure.

Difficulty: Basic 

Language: English

Target audience: HPC developers using CUDA in the network or cloud.

Prerequisite knowledge: Professional experience programming CUDA C/C++ applications, including the use of the nvcc compiler, kernel launches, grid-stride loops, host-to-device and device-to-host memory transfers, and CUDA error handling, familiarity with the Linux command line, and experience using Makefiles to compile C/C++ code.

Skills to be gained: 

By participating in this workshop, you’ll learn how to:

– Use concurrent CUDA Streams to overlap memory transfers with GPU computation.        
– Utilize all available GPUs on a single node to scale workloads across all available GPUs.        
– Combine the use of copy/compute overlap with multiple GPUs.        
– Rely on the NVIDIA ® Nsight TM Systems Visual Profiler timeline to observe improvement opportunities and the impact of the techniques covered in the workshop.        
 

Maximum number of participants: 30

Virtual location: MS Teams

Organizer:

---

Lecturers:

Name:	Domen Verber
	Domen Verber is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of the University of Maribor (UM FERI) and ambassador of the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute for the University of Maribor and their HPC specialist. He has been dealing with HPC and artificial intelligence issues for more than 25 years.
	domen.verber@um.si, deep.learning@um.si

 

Name:	Jani Dugonik
	Jani Dugonik is an academic researcher at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Informatics of the University of Maribor (UM FERI). He has been working in the field of natural language processing and evolutionary algorithms for more than 10 years.
	jani.dugonik@um.si

---

SLING dokumentacija za uporabnike

10:00 → 10:30 Introduction (- Meet the instructor. - Get familiar with your GPU-accelerated interactive JupyterLab environment.)

Conveners: Domen Verber, Jani Dugonik

10:30 → 10:45 Application Overview (– Orient yourself with a single GPU CUDA C++ application that will be the starting point for the course. – Observe the current performance of the single GPU CUDA C++ application using the Nsight Systems.)

10:45 → 12:45 Introduction to CUDA Streams: (– Learn the rules that govern concurrent CUDA Stream behavior. – Use multiple CUDA streams to perform concurrent host-to-device and device-to-host memory transfers. – Utilize multiple CUDA streams for launching GPU kernels. – Observe multiple streams in the Nsight Systems Visual Profiler timeline view.)

12:45 → 13:45 Lunch break

13:45 → 15:15 Copy/Compute Overlap with CUDA Streams (– Learn the key concepts for effectively performing copy/compute overlap. – Explore robust indexing strategies for the flexible use of copy/compute overlap in applications. – Refactor the single-GPU CUDA C++ application to perform copy/compute overlap. – See copy/compute overlap in the Nsight Systems visual profiler timeline.)

15:15 → 16:15 Multiple GPUs with CUDA C++ (– Learn the key concepts for effectively using multiple GPUs on a single node with CUDA C++. – Explore robust indexing strategies for the flexible use of multiple GPUs in applications. – Refactor the single-GPU CUDA C++ application to utilize multiple GPUs. – See multiple GPU utilization in the Nsight Systems Visual Profiler timeline.)

16:15 → 16:30 Coffee break

16:30 → 17:30 Copy/Compute Overlap with Multiple GPUs (– Learn the key concepts for effectively performing copy/compute overlap on multiple GPUs. – Explore robust indexing strategies for the flexible use of copy/compute overlap on multiple GPUs. – Refactor the single-GPU CUDA C++ application to perform copy/compute overlap on multiple GPUs. – Observe performance benefits for copy/compute overlap on multiple GPUs. – See copy/compute overlap on multiple GPUs in the Nsight Systems visual profiler timeline.)

17:30 → 18:00 Final Review (– Complete the assessment and earn a certificate. – Review key learnings and wrap up questions. – Learn to build your own training environment from the DLI base environment container. – Take the workshop survey.) Conveners: Domen Verber, Jani Dugonik