High performance computing on graphics processing units

The evolution of GPUs (graphics processing units) has been enormous in the past few years. Their calculation power has improved exponentially, while the range of the tasks computable on GPUs has got significantly wider. The milestone of GPU development of the recent years is the appearance of the unified architecture-based devices. These GPUs implement a massively parallel design, which led them be capable not only of processing the common computer graphics tasks, but qualifies them for performing highly parallel mathematical algorithms effectively. Recognizing this availability GPU providers have issued developer platforms, which let the programmers manage computations on the GPU as a data-parallel computing device without the need of mapping them to a graphics API. Researchers salute this initiative, and the application of the new technology is quickly spreading in various branches of scienc