CUDA stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture. It's a system developed by Nvidia that allows programmers to use the power of a graphics processing unit (GPU) for general computing tasks, not just graphics. This is known as General-Purpose computing on GPUs (GPGPU).
CPUs are good at handling a single task at a time, but GPUs are designed to handle many tasks simultaneously. This makes GPUs ideal for applications that involve a lot of data processing, such as machine learning, scientific computing, and video editing.
CUDA provides a way for programmers to write code that can run on both the CPU and the GPU. This allows them to take advantage of the strengths of both processors to improve the performance of their applications.
Here are some key points about CUDA:
- It's a parallel computing platform and API created by Nvidia for GPGPU.
- It uses a special dialect of C called CUDA C to allow programmers to write code for GPUs.
- It includes a toolkit with libraries, compilers, and debugging tools to help developers create CUDA applications.
- CUDA is widely used in many fields, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, scientific computing, and finance.