In November 2006, NVIDIA introduced CUDA®, a general purpose parallel computing platform and programming model that leverages the parallel compute engine in NVIDIA GPUs to solve many complex computational problems in a more efficient way than on a CPU.

The advent of multicore CPUs and manycore GPUs means that mainstream processor chips are now parallel systems. Furthermore, their parallelism continues to scale with Moore's law. The challenge is to develop application software that transparently scales its parallelism to leverage the increasing number of processor cores, much as 3D graphics applications transparently scale their parallelism to manycore GPUs with widely varying numbers of cores.

The CUDA parallel programming model is designed to overcome this challenge while maintaining a low learning curve for programmers familiar with standard programming languages such as C.

This guide is for C development for NVIDIA's CUDA programming platform.