In CUDA, Supercomputing for the Masses: Part 12 of this article series on CUDA, some of the paradigm changing features of the latest CUDA Toolkit 2.2 release were discussed. This article resumes the discussion of “texture memory” which was begun in Part 11 of this series. In addition, this installment includes information on the new CUDA Toolkit 2.2 texture capability that allows some programs to eliminate extra copies by providing the ability to write to global memory on the GPU that has a 2D texture bound to it.
From a C-programmer’s perspective, texture memory provides an unusual combination of cache memory (separate from register, global, and shared memory), local processing capability (separate from the scalar processors), and a way to interact with the display capabilities of the GPU. This article focuses on the cache and local processor capabilities of texture memory while the next column will discuss how to perform viewable graphic operations with the GPU.
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1 CUDA, Supercomputing for the Masses: Part 14 // Oct 17, 2009 at 7:21 am
[...] Rob Farber In CUDA, Supercomputing for the Masses: Part 13 of this article series, I resumed the discussion of “texture memory” began in Part 11 [...]