General-purpose computations using graphics processors

High-performance 3D graphics hardware has become as ubiquitous as floatingpoint hardware. The graphics processing unit (GPU) has, alongside the CPU, become one of the desktop's two major computational components. Developers design these GPUs to operate on data streams consisting of an ordered sequence of attributed primitives like vertices or fragments. Compared to conventional CPUs, GPUs consist of high-bandwidth memories and more floating-point hardware units. General-purpose computation using graphics processors (GPGP) involves the increasing use of GPUs' computational power in scientific, database, geometric, and other nongraphics applications. These GPGP applications use GPUs primarily designed for rapid rasterization of geometric primitives to shaded pixels on the screen.