Over the summer I had the privilege of attending a week-long workshop on CUDA hosted by the Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering. It was was free for students from the University of Illinois (and other partner institutions, I presume) and it was excellent. If you want to learn CUDA quickly and you want to learn it well, I highly recommend attending such a workshop.

Over the fall I started writing and using CUDA kernels in my research. This meant writing code in C. C is a great language, but it is not known for its w…