General Purpose GPU (GPGPU) Computing

Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) are special purpose processors that were originally designed to offload the computational task of rendering an image of a scene (usually from a 3D model) on to the screen of a personal computer or game console. As model sizes and complexity increased and the need for real time performance increased, these special processors were able to achieve incredible performance on the specialized calculations they were called to perform. When measured in terms of floating point operations per second (flops), modern GPUs (end 2006), are more than an order of magnitude faster than the fastest CPUs from AMD and Intel. What is more, since they are driven by a large multibillion dollar market, their prices are relatively low as well. The figure below shows a comparison between the peak single precision gigaflop ratings of graphics processors from ATI and NVIDIA and CPUs from Intel.

The goal of GPGPU computing is to use the power of the graphics processor for performing scientific computating.