CUDA
A parallel computing platform and programming model
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| Developer(s) | Nvidia Corporation |
|---|---|
| Initial release | June 23, 2007 |
| Stable release |
8.0 / September 28, 2016
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| Operating system |
Windows XP and later, macOS, Linux |
| Platform | Supported GPUs |
| Type | GPGPU |
| License | Freeware |
| Website | www |
CUDA is a parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) model created by Nvidia. It allows software developers and software engineers to use a CUDA-enabled graphics processing unit (GPU) for general purpose processing – an approach termed GPGPU (General-Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units). The CUDA platform is a software layer that gives direct access to the GPU's virtual instruction set and parallel computational elements, for the execution of compute kernels.
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 use GPU resources, in contrast to prior APIs 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.
The graphics processing unit (GPU), as a specialized computer processor, addresses the demands of real-time high-resolution 3D graphics compute-intensive tasks. By 2012, GPUs had evolved into highly parallel multi-core systems allowing very efficient manipulation of large blocks of data. This design is more effective than general-purpose central processing unit (CPUs) for algorithms in situations where processing large blocks of data is done in parallel, such as:
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