NVIDIA CUDA
NVIDIA CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) model created by NVIDIA. It allows software developers to use a CUDA-enabled graphics processing unit (GPU) for general purpose processing, enabling massive parallelization of computations. CUDA provides a programming model that extends languages like C, C++, and Fortran with GPU-specific functions and libraries.
Developers should learn CUDA when working on computationally intensive tasks that benefit from parallel processing, such as machine learning, scientific simulations, data analytics, and image/video processing. It is essential for high-performance computing (HPC) applications where leveraging GPU acceleration can significantly reduce processing time compared to CPU-only implementations. CUDA is widely used in AI/ML frameworks like TensorFlow and PyTorch for training deep neural networks.