Assignment 1 - CUDA and Bender Setup

Overview

The objective of this assignment is to get setup with using CUDA on the Bender ENGR server. The following tutorial provides detail steps and directions: BenderTutorial.pdf

If you are unfamiliar with using the Linux commandline, there's a great tutorial here: https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-the-command-line

1. For this lab, we will be using Github Classroom.
   Please join the classroom by clicking the following link: https://classroom.github.com/a/Sbpcbuf7
   Once you join the classroom, a private github repository will automatically be created with the starter code.
   Simply git clone to copy the starter code to Bender.

Vector Add

Once you have access to Bender and confirmed it can compile and run CUDA code, we will implement a simple Vector Add.

1. Clone the git repository. There should be 5 files: kernel.cu, main.cu, Makefile, support.cu, support.h
2. By default, vector add operates on 10000 elements, which are randomly generated. To ensure consistency when grading, do not change the srad seed value in main.cu line 9.
3. Complete the vector add application by adding your code to main.cu and kernel.cu. Use a thread block size of 512. You may consult the class slides on vector add.

Answer the following questions:

1. How many total thread blocks do we use?

2. Are all thread blocks full? That is, do all threads in the thread block have data to operate on?

3. How can this basic vector add program be improved? (What changes do you think can be made to speed up the code?)

Submission

1. Answer the previous questions by adding a report document in the repository. Please name your report FirstName-LastName.pdf or FirstName-LastName.txt or FirstName-LastName.docx, etc.
2. Commit and push your completed Vector Add to the github repository. (You only need to modify kernel.cu and main.cu.)

   Please also include your name in the report.