General Purpose - Graphics Processor Unit (GPU)

GPGPU stands for General Purpose Graphics Processor Unit and is the term used for computation on the GPU (Graphics Processor Unit).

With the increased programmability of today's modern (commonly available) graphics processing units (GPU's) they are capable of performing more than just graphics tasks (displays pixels on the screen) for which they were originally designed. They can now be used and are very capable co-processing units that can run along side CPU's to help compute data intensive calculations.

Programmable GPU's (ATI/AMD FireStream & NVIDIA Tesla) are now common place in High Performance Computing (HPC) data centre's and can be programmed to compute masses amount of data much quicker than conventional CPU's.