Since its inception, the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) has had promising possibilities as an accelerator for tasks other than graphics rendering. While the GPU in a gaming PC and one used as a general-purpose accelerator have considerable base-feature overlap, there are many benefits when optimizing these cards specifically for compute workloads. The ability to execute a plethora of simple calculations in parallel vastly improves the performance of any workload that could benefit from repetitive iteration. This is now coming of age as GPUs guide the future of supercomputing – bringing us into the Exascale Era.
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