GPUs traditionally, are utilized for graphical applications, which demand high number calculations within a very short time to achieve the desired effect. The ability of GPU to perform high computation and data throughput can be used for general-purpose applications of different fields such as scientific, analytics, engineering consumer, and the like. This process of using GPU computation power for general purpose applications is known as GPGPU (General-Purpose computation on GPU).

GPU-accelerated applications often achieve speedups in execution as compared to optimized CPU applications.