Cuda

Cuda may refer to:

See also

CUDA

CUDA is a parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) model created by NVIDIA. It allows software developers to use a CUDA-enabled graphics processing unit (GPU) for general purpose processing – an approach known as GPGPU. The CUDA platform is a software layer that gives direct access to the GPU's virtual instruction set and parallel computational elements.

The CUDA platform is designed to work with programming languages such as C, C++ and Fortran. This accessibility makes it easier for specialists in parallel programming to utilize GPU resources, as opposed to previous API solutions like Direct3D and OpenGL, which required advanced skills in graphics programming. Also, CUDA supports programming frameworks such as OpenACC and OpenCL. When it was first introduced by NVIDIA, the name CUDA was an acronym for Compute Unified Device Architecture, but NVIDIA subsequently dropped the use of the acronym.

Background

The GPU, as a specialized processor, addresses the demands of real-time high-resolution 3D graphics compute-intensive tasks. As of 2012, GPUs have evolved into highly parallel multi-core systems allowing very efficient manipulation of large blocks of data. This design is more effective than general-purpose CPUs for algorithms in situations where processing of large blocks of data is done in parallel, such as: