Foreword

During the past few years, heterogeneous computers composed of CPUs and GPUs have revolutionized computing. By matching different parts of a workload to the most suitable processor, tremendous performance gains have been achieved.

Much of this revolution has been driven by the emergence of many-core processors such as GPUs. For example, it is now possible to buy a graphics card that can execute more than a trillion floating point operations per second (teraflops). These GPUs were designed to render beautiful images, but for the right workloads, they can also be used as high-performance computing engines for applications from scientific computing to augmented reality.

A natural question is why these many-core processors are so fast compared ...

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