CUDA (an acronym for Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing architecture developed by NVIDIA. CUDA lets programmers utilize a dedicated driver written using C language subroutines to offload data processing to the graphics processing hardware found on Nvidia's latemodel GeForce graphics hardware. The software lets programmers use the cards to process data other than just graphics, without having to learn OpenGL or how to talk with the card specifically. Since CUDA tools first emerged in late 2006, Nvidia's seen them used in everything from consumer software to industrial products, and the applications are limitless
