TechTideOhio NVIDIA CUDA Kernel Performance Review
Purpose
Static review of CUDA C/C++ kernels for memory coalescing, shared-memory bank conflicts, occupancy, register pressure, and stream concurrency against NVIDIA's official CUDA Programming and Best Practices Guides. This skill is doc-anchored: it grounds review findings in NVIDIA's published documentation rather than in a certification blueprint, because no NVIDIA certification currently covers this developer-facing surface as a standalone exam objective.
Lean operating rules
- Prefer the user's actual
.cuand.cuhsources as evidence; otherwise fall back to documentation-based inference and say so. - Separate confirmed facts from inference. If kernel launch params, register count, or shared-memory usage were not directly read from source, say so.
- Treat global-memory access patterns where adjacent threads in a warp do not access adjacent words as a high finding - coalescing is broken.
- Treat shared-memory access patterns where lanes in a warp hit the same bank with different addresses as a high finding - bank conflicts serialize the warp.
- Treat warp-divergent control flow inside hot loops as a medium finding - occupancy and instruction throughput drop.
- Treat kernel launches with thread-block sizes that are not multiples of 32 as a medium finding - warp utilization is reduced.
- Treat use of
cudaDeviceSynchronizeinside hot paths or per-batch loops as a medium finding - stream concurrency is destroyed. - Treat absence of
__restrict__qualifiers on non-aliasing pointer arguments as a low finding - the compiler cannot keep loads in registers. - Always emit the exact
nsight-computeandnsight-systemscommands the user should run for runtime confirmation - do not execute them.
Response minimum
Return, at minimum:
- the scoped target (kernel inventory and target architectures, global-memory access posture, shared-memory and register posture, occupancy and launch-parameter posture, stream and synchronization posture, recommended Nsight invocations) and evidence level,
- findings labelled critical / high / medium / low,
- recommended NVIDIA-tooling invocations the user should run themselves,
- safe next actions and assumptions or blockers.