CUDA – GPU acceleration for fast training and evaluation

The NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit (https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-toolkit) is a fully optimized parallel computing platform for general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU). It allows us to perform scientific computing on NVIDIA graphic cards, including linear algebra, image and video processing, deep learning, and graph analytics. It is used by a lot of commercial and open source software to enable GPU-accelerated computation across different domains. If we look back at the development of deep learning, we should realize that the latest breakthroughs in GANs would have been almost impossible without the help of CUDA and powerful GPUs. Therefore, we highly recommend you try out the experiments in this book on a CUDA-compatible GPU; otherwise, the training time of neural networks could be painfully long...