Taking the graphics processor beyond graphics

For several years, graphics processing units' performance has been increasing faster than the pace predicted by Moore's law. This has occurred because GPUs must meet the demands of increasingly complex visual effects in games and entertainment applications. The performance and functionality have made GPUs potentially attractive as coprocessors for general-purpose computation. Researchers have also developed new algorithms and applications that exploit GPUs' parallelism and vector-processing capabilities, in which one operation can process an entire vector of numbers.