os-traits/doc/source/reference/index.rst

Reference

CUDA

Applications that need to perform massively parallel operations, like processing large arrays, may use the CUDA framework to accelerate their processing on graphics processing units (GPUs). The CUDA framework has two complementary pieces to it.

There are a set of GPU instruction set extensions that are implemented by various graphics cards. These instruction set extensions are known as the CUDA Compute Capability.

The second part of the framework is an SDK that allows developers to take advantage of the hardware's instruction set extensions of a particular version (a specific CUDA Compute Capability version, that is).

An application will link with a version of the CUDA SDK, and the version of the CUDA SDK controls which CUDA Compute Capability versions the application will be able to work with.

The os_traits.hw.gpu.cuda module contains traits for both the CUDA compute capability version as well as the CUDA SDK version. For example, os_traits.hw.gpu.cuda.COMPUTE_CAPABILITY_V3_2 and os_traits.hw.gpu.cuda.SDK_V6_5.

The os_traits.hw.gpu.cuda module contains a utility function called compute_capabilities_supported() that accepts a trait indicating the CUDA SDK version and returns a set() containing the matching CUDA compute capability traits that that version of the CUDA SDK knows how to utilize.

Here is an example of listing the CUDA compute capability version traits that the CUDA SDK 8.0 is capable of working with:

>>> from os_traits.hw.gpu import cuda
>>> import pprint
>>>
>>> sdk8_caps = cuda.compute_capabilities_supported(cuda.SDK_V8_0)
>>> pprint.pprint(sdk8_caps)
set(['HW_GPU_CUDA_COMPUTE_CAPABILITY_V2_0',
     'HW_GPU_CUDA_COMPUTE_CAPABILITY_V2_1',
     'HW_GPU_CUDA_COMPUTE_CAPABILITY_V3_0',
     'HW_GPU_CUDA_COMPUTE_CAPABILITY_V3_2',
     'HW_GPU_CUDA_COMPUTE_CAPABILITY_V3_5',
     'HW_GPU_CUDA_COMPUTE_CAPABILITY_V3_7',
     'HW_GPU_CUDA_COMPUTE_CAPABILITY_V5_0',
     'HW_GPU_CUDA_COMPUTE_CAPABILITY_V5_2',
     'HW_GPU_CUDA_COMPUTE_CAPABILITY_V5_3',
     'HW_GPU_CUDA_COMPUTE_CAPABILITY_V6_0',
     'HW_GPU_CUDA_COMPUTE_CAPABILITY_V6_1',
     'HW_GPU_CUDA_COMPUTE_CAPABILITY_V6_2'])

For more information on CUDA, see the Wikipedia article.