Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) is a parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) model created by Nvidia. It allows software developers and software engineers to use a CUDA-enabled graphics processing unit (GPU) for general purpose processing – an approach termed GPGPU (general-purpose computing on graphics processing units). The CUDA platform is a software layer that gives direct access to the GPU's virtual instruction set and parallel computational elements, for the execution of compute kernels.
The CUDA platform is designed to work with programming languages such as C, C++, and Fortran.