CUDA

CUDA is a parallel computing platform and programming model developed by Nvidia for general computing on its own GPUs (graphics processing units). CUDA enables developers to speed up compute-intensive applications by harnessing the power of GPUs for the parallelizable part of the computation.

This post is a super simple introduction to CUDA, the popular parallel computing platform and programming model from NVIDIA. I wrote a previous “Easy Introduction” to CUDA in 2013 that has been very popular over the years. But CUDA programming has gotten easier, and GPUs have gotten much faster, so it’s time for an updated (and even easier) introduction.

CUDA C++ is just one of the ways you can create massively parallel applications with CUDA. It lets you use the powerful C++ programming language to develop high performance algorithms accelerated by thousands of parallel threads running on GPUs. Many developers have accelerated their computation- and bandwidth-hungry applications this way, including the libraries and frameworks that underpin the ongoing revolution in artificial intelligence known as Deep Learning.