This book has been a journey, much like a daring mountain hike… but now, at last, we have arrived at the end of our trek. We now stand upon the summit of mount introductory-GPU-programming, and we stand proud as we gaze back upon our native village of serial-programming-ville and smile as we think about the quaint naivity of our old one-dimensional programming traditions, where we considered forking a process in Unix to be our entire understanding of the notion of parallel programming. We have braved many pitfalls and dangers to arrive at this point, and we may have even made such mishaps as installing a broken NVIDIA driver module in Linux, or maybe downloading the wrong Visual Studio version over a slow 100k connection while visiting our parents for vacation. But these setbacks were only temporary, leaving wounds that developed into calluses that made us even stronger against the forces of (GPU) nature.
But, in the corner of our eye, we can see two wooden signs a few meters away from where we are standing; we avert our gaze from the little village of our past and now take a look at them. The first has an arrow pointing in the direction from which we are currently faced, with only one word on it—PAST. The other is pointing in the opposite direction, also with only one word—FUTURE. We turn around in the direction pointing to FUTURE, and we see a large glimmering metropolis strewn out before us to the horizon, beckoning us. Now that we have finally caught our breath, we can start walking into the future…
In this chapter, we will go over some of the options that you now have so that you can continue your education and career in fields related to GPU programming. Whether you are trying to build a career, a hobbyist doing this for fun, an engineering student studying GPUs for a class, a programmer or engineer trying to enhance your technical background, or an academic scientist trying to apply GPUs to a research project, there are many, many options that you now have at this point. Much like our metaphorical metropolis, it is easy to get lost, and it is difficult to determine where we should go. We hope to provide something akin to a brief tour guide in this final chapter, providing you with some of the options for where you can go next.
We will now take a look at the following paths in this chapter:
- Advanced CUDA and GPGPU programming
- Graphics
- Machine learning and computer vision
- Blockchain technology