What is CUDA? — CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) model created by NVIDIA.[1] It allows software developers and software engineers to use a CUDA-enabled graphics processing unit (GPU) for general purpose processing – an approach known as GPGPU. 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.[2]