Summary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA
- CUDA (an acronym for Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) model created by Nvidia. [1]
- It allows software developers and software engineers to use a CUDA-enabled graphics processing unit (GPU) for general purpose processing – an approach termed GPGPU (general-purpose computing on graphics processing units).
- The CUDA platform is a software layer that gives direct access to the GPU’s virtual instruction set and parallel computational elements, for the execution of compute kernels.[2]
The CUDA platform is designed to work with programming languages such as C, C++, and Fortran. This accessibility makes it easier for specialists in parallel programming to use GPU resources, in contrast to prior APIs like Direct3D and OpenGL, which required advanced skills in graphics programming.[3] CUDA-powered GPUs also support programming frameworks such as OpenMP, OpenACC and OpenCL;[4][2] and HIP by compiling such code to CUDA. When CUDA was first introduced by Nvidia, the name was an acronym for Compute Unified Device Architecture,[5] but Nvidia subsequently dropped the common use of the acronym.