The CUDA Toolkit

The CUDA Toolkit is an ecosystem for executing extremely fast code on NVIDIA GPUs for the purpose of general computing.

CUDA includes many libraries for this purpose, including the Driver API, Runtime API, the PTX ISA, libnvvm, etc. CUDA is currently the best option for computing in terms of libraries and control available, however, it unfortunately only works on NVIDIA GPUs.

This section will cover some of the general uses of GPU computing, why use CUDA, and general CUDA principles. This section will not cover everything about CUDA and it is not meant to. You can check out the official CUDA guide for a complete overview.