What is Cuda in the video card?

CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture), graphics manufacturer Nvidia launched the computing platform. Cuda™ is a general-purpose parallel computing architecture introduced by NVIDIA, which enables the GPU to solve complex computational problems. It contains the CUDA instruction set architecture (ISA) and the parallel computing engine within the GPU.

The computing industry is developing "collaborative processing" from CPU-only "central processing" to CPU and GPU. To create this new paradigm of computing, nvidia® (NVIDIA) invented the programming model of CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecturem, Unified Computing Device architecture), which is to make full use of the advantages of CPUs and GPU in applications. Now that the architecture has been applied to geforce®, ion™ (Wing), Quadro, and Tesla GPU (graphics processor), this is a huge market for application developers.

In the consumer market, almost every major consumer-level video application has been accelerated by CUDA or will soon use Cuda, including elemental Technologies, MOTIONDSP and Loilo. In the scientific field, CUDA has been hot-won. For example, Cuda is now able to accelerate the amber. Amber is a molecular dynamics simulation program that is used by more than 60,000 researchers worldwide in academia and pharmaceutical companies to speed up the exploration of new drugs. In the financial markets, Numerix and Compatibl released Cuda support for a new counterparty risk application and achieved a 18 times-fold increase in speed. Numerix is widely used by nearly 400 financial institutions.

The wide application of Cuda has created the rise of GPU computing dedicated Tesla GPU. Global Fortune 500 companies have now installed more than 700 GPU clusters, which cover various fields such as Schlumberger and Chevron in the energy sector and BNP Paribas in the banking sector. With the advent of Microsoft Windows 7 and the Apple Snow Leopard operating system, GPU computing will become mainstream. In these new operating systems, the GPU will not just be a graphics processor, it will also be a general-purpose parallel processor that all applications can use.

The application of Cuda

The computing industry is developing "collaborative processing" from CPU-only "central processing" to CPU and GPU. To create this new paradigm of computing, Nvidia invented the programming model of CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecturem, Unified Computing Device architecture), which is to make full use of the advantages of CPU and GPU in the application. Now that the architecture has been applied to GeForce, ION (Wing Yang), Quadro, and Tesla GPU (graphics processor), this is a huge market for application developers.

The cause of Cuda

With the development of the graphics card, the GPU becomes more and more powerful, and the GPU optimizes the display image. Has gone beyond the general-purpose CPU in computing. Such a powerful chip if only as a video card is too wasteful, so Nvidia launched Cuda, so that the graphics card can be used for purposes other than image calculation.

Composition of the CUDA architecture

Development Library: The development Library is an application development library based on CUDA technology.

Runtime Environment: The runtime Environment provides application development interfaces and Run-time components, including definitions of basic data types and various functions such as calculation, type conversion, memory management, device access, and execution scheduling.

Drive: cuda-enable The device abstraction layer of the GPU, providing an abstract access interface for hardware devices. This is the need to install the Nvidia hardware on the computer to install the appropriate driver to achieve CUDA general operations.