Sectors, Coalescing and Vector Loads in CUDA

Memory coalescing occurs when all threads in a warp access a contiguous chunk of data from global memory. The CUDA C++ Best Practices guide states this in a more precise way: ... the concurrent accesses of the threads of a warp will coalesce into a number of transactions equal to the number of 32-byte transactions necessary to service all of the threads of the warp. For example, if all threads in…