Kicking off the Parallel Programmer
What’s Next?
With a three-year stint at AMD now in the rear-view mirror, it is time to reflect on next steps in the industry. Having grown up with the PC industry (in middle school, I looked forward to the release of the Intel 80286 processor), I have a lot of perspective to share: from my stint as Direct3D development lead at Microsoft, to building the CUDA driver API at NVIDIA, to bringing GPUs into Amazon’s cloud and writing The CUDA Handbook, to writing parallel code for a high-frequency trading firm… there’s a lot of material to cover and I decided now is as good a time as any to start.
We’ll cover a variety of topics:
1. The CUDA Handbook 2e
The CUDA Handbook has received favorable reviews, and I negotiated a rights reversion with Pearson a few years ago. It is no longer in print, so I plan to bring it back into print and update it (not necessarily in that order).
When I wrote the first edition, the goal was to be so rich and dense in content that every page had something the reader could learn - even if the reader was a seasoned CUDA developer. The second edition will cover more, and possibly find its way into other form factors. Morgan McGuire’s Graphics Codex may serve as an exemplar.
2. Coding Puzzles, and Their (Often Parallel) Solutions
I enjoy isolating problems and examining and explaining their solutions, in the spirit of Jon Bentley’s Programming Pearls. The CUDA Handbook is necessarily CUDA-specific, but this space will be a safe place for folks who enjoy writing AVX2/AVX512 code and multithreading as well as writing CUDA code.
3. Industry Commentary
On The CUDA Handbook blog, I’ve written on topics such as the Google v. Oracle Supreme Court decision and its applicability to API design. I also have done diligence on dozens of prospective acquisitions at Amazon and AMD, sponsoring at least one very successful acquisition at each of those companies. This space is the sensible place to write about such things, and the CUDA Handbook blog can focus on CUDA, as one would expect.
I have a few friends who’ve tentatively agreed to join me on a podcast, so I may be able to offer a more diverse set of perspectives than just my own.
