General-purpose computing on graphics processing units

Use of a GPU for computations typically assigned to CPUs

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, with special accelerated instructions for processing image or other graphic forms of data.

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