Article published in Electronic Design:
This article deflates a number of the myths that have emerged regarding the use of GPU/GPGPUs in defense applications.
1. GPUs are just for rendering video and processing images.
As the name would imply, graphics processing units (GPUs) were originally designed to process and render images and video. Whether in the form of a discrete device or embedded alongside CPU cores on a single die, they are resident in every laptop, desktop, and gaming console. They are also used in their primary function within defense applications to render displays and compress captured video.
Approximately 15 years ago, engineers discovered GPUs could make great math acceleration engines based on the introduction of programmable shaders with floating-point support in GPUs. They realized this could be applied in situations where the data in motion moves much like images, and the required processing is well-suited for vector and matrix mathematical operations.
Subsequently, the term general-purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU) was born, and languages such as CUDA and OpenCL have developed to abstract away the complexities of the underlying GPGPU architecture. As a result, developers could focus on linear algebraic algorithms and digital-signal-processing functions.