Performance Optimization and Analysis for High-Performance Computing
This hands-on course teaches you how to unlock the huge parallel-processing power of modern GPUs with CUDA. You’ll start with the fundamentals of GPU hardware, trace the evolution of flagship architectures (Fermi → Pascal → Volta → Ampere → Hopper), and learn—through code-along labs—how to write, profile, and optimize high-performance kernels.
This is an independent training resource. It is not sponsored by, endorsed by, or otherwise affiliated with NVIDIA Corporation. “CUDA”, “Nsight”, and the architecture codenames are trademarks of NVIDIA and are used here only as factual references.
What you'll learn
Who this course is for:
12 sections • 58 lectures • 23h 3m total length
Introduction to the Nvidia GPUs hardware
12 lectures • 2hr 52min
4 lectures • 22min
8 lectures • 1hr 52min
9 lectures • 4hr 18min
2 lectures • 45min
2 lectures • 1hr 16min
2 lectures • 50min
1 lecture • 40min
7 lectures • 4hr 30min
1 lecture • 43min
Hamdy egy is a Research Assistant and a Ph.D. student. He graduated from the Computer and System Engineering Department in 2012 and was ranked second in his class. After graduation, he worked as a teaching assistant in the same department for about 10 years. He also worked as an embedded systems instructor for 5 years.
This hands-on course teaches you how to unlock the huge parallel-processing power of modern GPUs with CUDA. You’ll start with the fundamentals of GPU hardware, trace the evolution of flagship architectures (Fermi → Pascal → Volta → Ampere → Hopper), and learn—through code-along labs—how to write, profile, and optimize high-performance kernels.
This is an independent training resource. It is not sponsored by, endorsed by, or otherwise affiliated with NVIDIA Corporation. “CUDA”, “Nsight”, and the architecture codenames are trademarks of NVIDIA and are used here only as factual references.
What you'll learn
- Comprehensive Understanding of GPU vs CPU Architecture
- learn the history of graphical processing unit (GPU) until the most recent products
- Understand the internal structure of GPU
- Understand the different types of memories and how they affect the performance
- Understand the most recent technologies in the GPU internal components
- Understand the basics of the CUDA programming on GPU
- Start programming GPU using both CUDA on Both windows and linux
- understand the most efficient ways for parallelization
- Profiling and Performance Tuning
- Leveraging Shared Memory
- GPU vs. CPU fundamentals – why GPUs dominate data-parallel workloads.
- Generational design advances – the hardware features that matter most for performance.
- CUDA toolkit installation – Windows, Linux, and WSL, plus first-run sanity checks.
- Core CUDA concepts – threads, blocks, grids, and the memory hierarchy, built up with labs such as vector addition.
- Profiling & tuning with Nsight Compute / nvprof – measure occupancy, hide latency, and break bottlenecks.
- 2-D indexing for matrices – write efficient kernels for real-world linear-algebra tasks.
- Optimization playbook – handle non-power-of-two data, leverage shared memory, maximize bandwidth, and minimize warp divergence.
- Robust debugging & error handling – use runtime-API checks to ship production-ready code.
Who this course is for:
- For any one interested in GPU and CUDA like engineering students, researchers and any other one
- C and C++ basics
- Linux and windows basics
- Computer Architecture basics
12 sections • 58 lectures • 23h 3m total length
Introduction to the Nvidia GPUs hardware
12 lectures • 2hr 52min
- GPU vs CPU (very important)
- NVidia's history (How Nvidia started dominating the GPU sector)
- Architectures and Generations relationship [Hopper, Ampere, GeForce and Tesla]
- How to know the Architecture and Generation
- The difference between the GPU and the GPU Chip
- The architectures and the corresponding chips
- Nvidia GPU architectures From Fermi to hopper
- Parameters required to compare between different Architectures
- Please don't skip this video. It is pivotal for the the whole course.
- Half, single and double precision operations
- Compute capability and utilizations of the GPUs
- Before reading any whitepapers !! look at this
- Volta+Ampere+Pascal+SIMD (Don't skip)
4 lectures • 22min
- What features installed with the CUDA toolkit?
- Installing CUDA on Windows
- Installing WSL to use Linux on windows OS.
- Installing Cuda toolkits on Linux
8 lectures • 1hr 52min
- The course github repo
- Mapping SW from CUDA to HW + introducing CUDA.
- 001 Hello World program (threads - Blocks)
- Compiling Cuda on Linux
- 002 Hello World program ( Warp_IDs)
- 003 : Vector addition + the Steps for any CUDA project
- 004 : Vector addition + blocks and thread indexing + GPU performance
- 005 levels of parallelization - Vector addition with Extra-large vectors
9 lectures • 4hr 18min
- Query the device properties using the Runtime APIs
- Nvidia-smi and its configurations (Linux User)
- The GPU's Occupancy and Latency hiding
- Allocated active blocks per SM (important)
- how many blocks can we run concurrently per SM?
- Starting with the nsight compute (first issue)
- All profiling tools from NVidia (Nsight systems - compute - nvprof ...)
- Error checking APIs
- Nsight Compute performance using command line analysis
- Graphical Nsight Compute (windows and linux)
2 lectures • 45min
- Performance analysis
- Vector addition with a size not power of 2 !!! important
2 lectures • 1hr 16min
- Matrices addition using 2D of blocks and threads
- Why L1 Hit-rate is zero?
2 lectures • 50min
- The shared memory
- Quiz 1
- Warp Divergence
1 lecture • 40min
- Debugging using visual studio (important) 1
7 lectures • 4hr 30min
- Vector Reduction using global memory only (baseline)
- Understanding the code and the profiling of the vector reduction
- Optimizing the vector reduction (removing the filter)
- The Race Condition and the debugging option
- Optimizing the thread utilizations on vector reduction
- Optimization using shared memory and unrolling
- Shuffle operations optimizations
1 lecture • 43min
- Roofline Analysis
Compute and Memory bounds apps)
Hamdy egy is a Research Assistant and a Ph.D. student. He graduated from the Computer and System Engineering Department in 2012 and was ranked second in his class. After graduation, he worked as a teaching assistant in the same department for about 10 years. He also worked as an embedded systems instructor for 5 years.