Programming Massively Parallel Processors: A Hands-on Approach

[Rys]

Has anyone had the chance to spend any time with the book (Dave Kirk and Wen-mei Hwu) yet? Any early reviews? All I can find on the web is the usual testament stuff saying it's great.

Their CUDA course at UIUC was very nice, and I'm guessing that the hands-on approach means the book uses CUDA heavily in much the same way as well. Not that it'd matter too much, but I'd like to know what I'd be buying.

 

[Rys]

First three chapters: http://www.elsevierdirect.com/morgan_kaufmann/Excerpt_Parallel_Processors.pdf

 

[pcchen]

The number of pages is on the lighter side... but the content surely looks promising, especially those case studies.
My local computer bookstore does not have it yet though (it may take sometime for them to import this book), so I can't peek at the more interesting parts to decide whether to take it or not.

 

[pcchen]

My local bookstore has imported it according to their website. I'll check it when I go back to Taipei (I stayed home this whole week for the Chinese New Year).

 

[Rys]

What did you think, pcchen?

 

[pcchen]

To be honest, I just took a brief look over the book for a while (my colleague got the book, not me ). But from what I heard it's pretty nice to have for someone who has no experiences in GPGPU programming and wants to start from somewhere. It's easier than reading the programming guides, documents, and samples from NVIDIA. I didn't see anything not in the documents though. Also I think its case studies are pretty interesting, although a bit brief.

 

[Rys]

Cool, thanks for the mini review. I'm not that enthusiastic about it now, but I'll probably still pick up a copy when I get round to buying my next batch of literature.