CUDA (compute unified device architecture) is NVIDIA’s GPU architecture featured in the GeForce 8800. Positioning itself as a new means for general purpose computing with GPUs, CUDA provides 128 cooperating cores. Because the cores can communicate with each other, the GPU can run multithreaded applications without the need for stream computing. Along with this innovation, NVIDIA has released a software development kit that includes a standard C compiler as well as an optimized BLAS library. CUDA may indeed be the final piece needed to make GPUs the next wave in HPC.