Chapter 1. Why CUDA? Why Now?

There was a time in the not-so-distant past when parallel computing was looked upon as an “exotic” pursuit and typically got compartmentalized as a specialty within the field of computer science. This perception has changed in profound ways in recent years. The computing world has shifted to the point where, far from being an esoteric pursuit, nearly every aspiring programmer needs training in parallel programming to be fully effective in computer science. Perhaps you’ve picked this book up unconvinced about the importance of parallel programming in the computing world today and the increasingly large role it will play in the years to come. This introductory chapter will examine recent trends in the hardware that does the heavy lifting for the software that we as programmers write. In doing so, we hope to convince you that the parallel computing revolution has already happened and that, by learning CUDA C, you’ll be well positioned to write high-performance applications for heterogeneous platforms that contain both central and graphics processing units.