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Concept
General-purpose computing on graphics processing units
Summary
General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU, or less often GPGP) is the use of a graphics processing unit (GPU), which typically handles computation only for computer graphics, to perform computation in applications traditionally handled by the central processing unit (CPU). The use of multiple video cards in one computer, or large numbers of graphics chips, further parallelizes the already parallel nature of graphics processing.
Essentially, a GPGPU pipeline is a kind of parallel processing between one or more GPUs and CPUs that analyzes data as if it were in image or other graphic form. While GPUs operate at lower frequencies, they typically have many times the number of cores. Thus, GPUs can process far more pictures and graphical data per second than a traditional CPU. Migrating data into graphical form and then using the GPU to scan and analyze it can create a large speedup.
GPGPU pipelines were developed at the beginning of the 21st century for graphics processing (e.g. for better shaders). These pipelines were found to fit scientific computing needs well, and have since been developed in this direction.
In principle, any arbitrary boolean function, including addition, multiplication, and other mathematical functions, can be built up from a functionally complete set of logic operators. In 1987, Conway's Game of Life became one of the first examples of general-purpose computing using an early stream processor called a blitter to invoke a special sequence of logical operations on bit vectors.
General-purpose computing on GPUs became more practical and popular after about 2001, with the advent of both programmable shaders and floating point support on graphics processors. Notably, problems involving matrices and/or vectors - especially two-, three-, or four-dimensional vectors - were easy to translate to a GPU, which acts with native speed and support on those types. A significant milestone for GPGPU was the year 2003 when two research groups independently discovered GPU-based approaches for the solution of general linear algebra problems on GPUs that ran faster than on CPUs.
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