What Is CUDA | NVIDIA Official Blog: Even with this broad and expanding interest, as I travel across the United States educating researchers and students about the benefits of GPU acceleration, I routinely get asked the question “what is CUDA?”
Most people confuse CUDA for a language or maybe an API. It is not.
It’s more than that. CUDA is a parallel computing platform and programming model�that makes using a GPU for general purpose computing simple and elegant. The developer still programs in the familiar C, C , Fortran, or an ever expanding list of supported languages, and incorporates extensions of these languages in the form of a few basic keywords.
These keywords let the developer express massive amounts of parallelism and direct the compiler to the portion of the application that maps to the GPU.
A simple example of code is shown below. It’s written first in plain “C” and then in “C with CUDA extensions.
Most people confuse CUDA for a language or maybe an API. It is not.
It’s more than that. CUDA is a parallel computing platform and programming model�that makes using a GPU for general purpose computing simple and elegant. The developer still programs in the familiar C, C , Fortran, or an ever expanding list of supported languages, and incorporates extensions of these languages in the form of a few basic keywords.
These keywords let the developer express massive amounts of parallelism and direct the compiler to the portion of the application that maps to the GPU.
A simple example of code is shown below. It’s written first in plain “C” and then in “C with CUDA extensions.