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Compute Unified Device Architecture is an easy way to use GPU for General Purpose Programming. No graphics knowledge is required to use CUDA for doing a program using GPU. A CUDA program is almost same as a C program but have some additional features. In CUDA a function can be run in many threads by giving a execution configuration while calling a function. There are 3 kinds of functions in CUDA. A device function which can be only executed in the device and called from device, a global function which can be called from host(CPU) using some configuration and gets executed in device, and a pure host function which must be executed in the CPU only.

There are some additional specifiers to distinguish the function type.

__device__ - if a function is suffixed with __device__ it becomes a device function which can only be executed at device and which can only be called from a function that executes on device.
__host__ - These functions are the normal C functions that can be executed on the host(CPU)
__global__ - A function suffixed with __global__ can be called from CPU. But for calling this function the execution configuration must be mentioned. The execution configuration decides how many threads and blocks have to be made for executing this function.

Also there are different kinds of memory,

__shared__ - if this is prefixed that memory becomes a shared memory and it can be shared across threads. This is the fastest memory.
__constant__ - a memory to which we can write from host only.
__device__ - a memory to which we can write from both device and host.


Each thread will have a thread ID and block ID to know which area of the data need to be processed by this thread. This is the tricky area where all the performance improvement lies.

I think by "device function", it refers to CUDA kernel. :|

Aren't read & write device functions ?

read(), write(), lseek() are device functions only. As the Char Devices are registers to VFS.