NCA GPU Architecture & Fundamentals 3

Question 1

What is the purpose of Tensor Cores in NVIDIA GPUs like Volta, Turing, Ampere, and Hopper?

Accepted Answer

Perform high-throughput matrix multiply-accumulate (MMA) operations for AI workloads

Answer

Tensor Cores are specialized hardware units designed to execute mixed-precision matrix multiply-accumulate operations at very high throughput, accelerating deep learning training and inference.

Question 2

In NVIDIA's CUDA programming model, what is the relationship between a thread block and a Streaming Multiprocessor (SM)?

Accepted Answer

Multiple thread blocks can reside on a single SM simultaneously, subject to resource limits

Answer

Multiple thread blocks can be co-resident on an SM simultaneously, limited by available shared memory, registers, and block slots, enabling latency hiding through concurrency.

Question 3

What is 'memory coalescing' in the context of NVIDIA GPU global memory access?

Accepted Answer

Merging consecutive thread memory accesses into a single wide memory transaction

Answer

Memory coalescing merges individual thread memory requests into a single wide memory transaction when threads in a warp access consecutive addresses, maximizing memory bandwidth utilization.

Question 4

Which NVIDIA interconnect technology allows multiple GPUs to share a unified memory address space with high bandwidth?

Accepted Answer

NVLink

Answer

NVLink is NVIDIA's high-bandwidth GPU-to-GPU interconnect that supports peer-to-peer memory access and high-throughput data transfers far exceeding PCIe bandwidth.

Question 5

What does 'occupancy' mean in the context of NVIDIA GPU performance tuning?

Accepted Answer

The ratio of active warps to the maximum possible warps on an SM

Answer

Occupancy is the ratio of active warps to the maximum warps an SM can support, and higher occupancy generally enables better latency hiding through warp switching.

(NCA) NVIDIA-Certified Associate Practice Test

(NCA) NVIDIA-Certified Associate Practice Test

NCA GPU Architecture & Fundamentals 3