Memory (Computer)

Memory Alignment

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1063809/aligned-and-unaligned-memory-accesses

I still have a lot of trouble understanding this.

You will hear these different terminologies

1. Byte Aligned
2. Word Aligned
3. Memory Aligned

There is also DRAM Bursting.

CUDA

Understanding how memory is aligned will be fundamental to getting CUDA to run so much faster.

https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-c-programming-guide/index.html#device-memory-accesses

“When a warp executes an instruction that accesses global memory, it coalesces the memory accesses of the threads within the warp into one or more of these memory transactions depending on the size of the word accessed by each thread and the distribution of the memory addresses across the threads”

CUDA Memory Alignment

Also see CUDA Memory.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16119943/how-and-when-should-i-use-pitched-pointer-with-the-cuda-api