Acknowledgments

It’s been said that it takes a village to write a technical book, and CUDA by Example is no exception to this adage. The authors owe debts of gratitude to many people, some of whom we would like to thank here.

Ian Buck, NVIDIA’s senior director of GPU computing software, has been immeasurably helpful in every stage of the development of this book, from championing the idea to managing many of the details. We also owe Tim Murray, our always-smiling reviewer, much of the credit for this book possessing even a modicum of technical accuracy and readability. Many thanks also go to our designer, Darwin Tat, who created fantastic cover art and figures on an extremely tight schedule. Finally, we are much obliged to John Park, who helped guide this project through the delicate legal process required of published work.

Without help from Addison-Wesley’s staff, this book would still be nothing more than a twinkle in the eyes of the authors. Peter Gordon, Kim Boedigheimer, and Julie Nahil have all shown unbounded patience and professionalism and have genuinely made the publication of this book a painless process. Additionally, Molly Sharp’s production work and Kim Wimpsett’s copyediting have utterly transformed this text from a pile of documents riddled with errors to the volume you’re reading today.

Some of the content of this book could not have been included without the help of other contributors. Specifically, Nadeem Mohammad was instrumental in researching the CUDA case studies we present in Chapter 1, and Nathan Whitehead generously provided code that we incorporated into examples throughout the book.

We would be remiss if we didn’t thank the others who read early drafts of this text and provided helpful feedback, including Genevieve Breed and Kurt Wall. Many of the NVIDIA software engineers provided invaluable technical assistance during the course of developing the content for CUDA by Example, including Mark Hairgrove who scoured the book, uncovering all manner of inconsistencies—technical, typographical, and grammatical. Steve Hines, Nicholas Wilt, and Stephen Jones consulted on specific sections of the CUDA API, helping elucidate nuances that the authors would have otherwise overlooked. Thanks also go out to Randima Fernando who helped to get this project off the ground and to Michael Schidlowsky for acknowledging Jason in his book.

And what acknowledgments section would be complete without a heartfelt expression of gratitude to parents and siblings? It is here that we would like to thank our families, who have been with us through everything and have made this all possible. With that said, we would like to extend special thanks to loving parents, Edward and Kathleen Kandrot and Stephen and Helen Sanders. Thanks also go to our brothers, Kenneth Kandrot and Corey Sanders. Thank you all for your unwavering support.