With the increasing programmability of commodity graphics processing units (GPUs), these chips are capable of performing more than the specific graphics computations for which they were designed.
provides a software development platform that allows developers to take advantage of a new generation of high performance processors. These new processors, including GPUs, the IBM Cell, and other multi-core processors
contains over 40 chapters and nearly 1000 pages full of the latest GPU programming techniques, and includes hundreds of full-color diagrams and pictures. GPU Gems 3 won the Game Developer Magazine's 2007 Front Line Award. Aailable for free online on the NVIDIA Developer Site
CUDA lets you work with familiar programming concepts while developing software that can run on a GP This is the first of a series of articles to introduce you to the power of CUDA -- through working code -- and to the thought process to help you map applications onto multi-threaded hardware (such as GPUs) to get big performance increases. Of course, not all problems can be mapped efficiently onto multi-threaded hardware, so part of my thought process will be to distinguish what will and what won't work, plus provide a common-sense idea of what might work "well-enough". "CUDA programming" and "GPGPU programming" are not the same (although CUDA runs on GPUs). CUDA permits working with familiar programming concepts while developing software that can run on a GPU. It also avoids the performance overhead of graphics layer APIs by compiling your software directly to the hardware (GPU assembly language, for instance), thereby providing great performance.
Despite begin a unique, key marketing feature of Snow Leopard, Apple has decided to open the code behind Grand Central Dispatch under the liberal Apache 2.0 license. Snow Leopard's new Grand Central Dispatch feature, which serves as a system-wide mechanism for managing parallel task execution across multiple processor cores for developers, involves multiple components in the operating system.