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Comment by ChristianGeek | Hacker News Reader

I'm taking a free course in CUDA programming on Udacity at the moment that's co-taught by a guy from NVIDIA Research and a professor from UC Davis. If you're looking for something that starts from the basics and is really easy to follow, I highly recommend it.

https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-parallel-programming...

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I'm working on a Ph.D. working in GPU architecture, and this course is the real deal. It goes beyond how to run things on a GPU to analyzing the runtime and work efficiency of algorithms suited to the GPU.

Wen-mei Hwu's lectures on "Advanced Algorithmic Techiques for GPUs" (first lecture slides: http://iccs.lbl.gov/assets/docs/2011-01-24/lecture1_computat...) are a gold mine of GPU programming techniques. I believe he has published several books on the topic too, and released a benchmark suite (Parboil http://impact.crhc.illinois.edu/parboil/parboil.aspx) optimized with these techinques.

He runs a Coursera MOOC too, how useful is that? I gave up early on because the homework was very simple.

The university course is also a joke, except for the project, which is "what you make of it".

I took the course at UIUC (ECE 408) 2 years ago. While the assignments weren't too challenging, I thought they were thorough in covering the material from class, and the material from class came straight from Professor Hwu's book.

Plus, the final exam was extremely harsh so I wouldn't have called it a joke.

Compared to the physics classes or that algorithm class, I put my brain on auto-pilot. Sure, the final was hard but mostly because I didn't have time to write code in a word document, and people who went to the official exam area actually got significantly more time (I took it a few years before you).

Many things were missing from that class, including how to improve performance by ensuring that warp receives the optimal data size, for example by using float4.

I could have learned the same stuff by looking at his MOOC - which is what OP got bored of doing.

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