Introducing CUDA

Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA)  is a very popular parallel computing platform and programming model developed by NVIDIA.  It is only supported on NVIDIA GPUs. OpenCL is used to write parallel code for other types of GPUs such as AMD and Intel, but it is more complex than CUDA. CUDA allows creating massively parallel applications running on graphics processing units (GPUs) with simple programming APIs. Software developers using C and C++ can accelerate their software application and leverage the power of GPUs by using CUDA C or C++. Programs written in CUDA are similar to programs written in simple C or C++ with the addition of keywords needed to exploit parallelism of GPUs. CUDA allows a programmer to specify which part of CUDA code will execute on the CPU and which part will execute on the GPU.  

The next section describes the need for parallel computing and how CUDA architecture can leverage the power of the GPU, in detail.