Acknowledgements

There are so many people who have made special contributions to the second edition. We would like to first thank the contributing authors of the new chapters. Yuan Lin and Vinod Grover wrote the original draft of the OpenACC chapter. Nathan Bell and Jared Hoberock wrote the original draft of the Thrust chapter, with additional contributions on the foundational concepts from Chris Rodrigues. Greg Ruetsch and Massimiliano Fatica wrote the original draft of the CUDA FORTRAN chapter. David Callahan wrote the C++AMP Chapter. Isaac Gelado wrote the original draft of the MPI-CUDA chapter. Brent Oster contributed to base material and code examples of the Kepler chapter. Without the expertise and contribution of these individuals, we would not have been able to cover these new programming models with the level of insight that we wanted to provide to our readers.

We would like to give special thanks to Izzat El Hajj, who tirelessly helped to verify the code examples and improved the quality of illustrations and exercises.

We would like to especially acknowledge Ian Buck, the father of CUDA and John Nickolls, the lead architect of Tesla GPU Computing Architecture. Their teams laid an excellent infrastructure for this course. John passed away while we were working on the second edition. We miss him dearly. Nadeem Mohammad organized the NVIDIA review efforts and also contributed to Appendix B. Bill Bean, Simon Green, Mark Harris, Nadeem Mohammad, Brent Oster, Peter Shirley, Eric Young and Cyril Zeller provided review comments and corrections to the manuscripts. Calisa Cole helped with cover. Nadeem’s heroic efforts have been critical to the completion of this book.

We would like to especially thank Jensen Huang for providing a great amount of financial and human resources for developing the course that laid the foundation for this book. Tony Tamasi’s team contributed heavily to the review and revision of the book chapters. Jensen also took the time to read the early drafts of the chapters and gave us valuable feedback. David Luebke has facilitated the GPU computing resources for the course. Jonah Alben has provided valuable insight. Michael Shebanow and Michael Garland have given guest lectures and offered materials.

John Stone and Sam Stone in Illinois contributed much of the base material for the case study and OpenCL chapters. John Stratton and Chris Rodrigues contributed some of the base material for the computational thinking chapter. I-Jui “Ray” Sung, John Stratton, Xiao-Long Wu, Nady Obeid contributed to the lab material and helped to revise the course material as they volunteered to serve as teaching assistants on top of their research. Jeremy Enos worked tirelessly to ensure that students have a stable, user-friendly GPU computing cluster to work on their lab assignments and projects.

We would like to acknowledge Dick Blahut who challenged us to create the course in Illinois. His constant reminder that we needed to write the book helped keep us going. Beth Katsinas arranged a meeting between Dick Blahut and NVIDIA Vice President Dan Vivoli. Through that gathering, Blahut was introduced to David and challenged David to come to Illinois and create the course with Wen-mei.

We would also like to thank Thom Dunning of the University of Illinois and Sharon Glotzer of the University of Michigan, Co-Directors of the multi-university Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering, for graciously hosting the summer school version of the course. Trish Barker, Scott Lathrop, Umesh Thakkar, Tom Scavo, Andrew Schuh, and Beth McKown all helped organize the summer school. Robert Brunner, Klaus Schulten, Pratap Vanka, Brad Sutton, John Stone, Keith Thulborn, Michael Garland, Vlad Kindratenko, Naga Govindaraju, Yan Xu, Arron Shinn, and Justin Haldar contributed to the lectures and panel discussions at the summer school.

Nicolas Pinto tested the early versions of the first chapters in his MIT class and assembled an excellent set of feedback comments and corrections. Steve Lumetta and Sanjay Patel both taught versions of the course and gave us valuable feedback. John Owens graciously allowed us to use some of his slides. Tor Aamodt, Dan Connors, Tom Conte, Michael Giles, Nacho Navarro and numerous other instructors and their students worldwide have provided us with valuable feedback.

We would like to especially thank our colleagues Kurt Akeley, Al Aho, Arvind, Dick Blahut, Randy Bryant, Bob Colwell, Ed Davidson, Mike Flynn, John Hennessy, Pat Hanrahan, Nick Holonyak, Dick Karp, Kurt Keutzer, Dave Liu, Dave Kuck, Yale Patt, David Patterson, Bob Rao, Burton Smith, Jim Smith and Mateo Valero who have taken the time to share their insight with us over the years.

We are humbled by the generosity and enthusiasm of all the great people who contributed to the course and the book.

David B. Kirk and Wen-mei W. Hwu