CHANCES are there is a graphics chip in your desktop computer, and it is fuelling a revolution. These chips, called GPUs, have of late been co-opted from their original use in giving video games their impressive visuals. Their talent for parallel processing is helping to speed up everything from medical imaging to studies of the cosmos. And they could be the key to future generations of ultrapowerful smartphones and tablet computers.
Introduced by chip-maker Nvidia in 1999, these graphics processing units took personal computing by storm. Augmenting a PC's central processing unit with a GPU allowed software designers to transform, say, video games, into the immersive virtual environments we now take for granted.
Software initiatives, such as Nvidia's CUDA, launched in 2007, and the Apple-led OpenCL project from 2008, opened up these chips for non-graphics applications.
Researchers have been reaping the benefits ever since. The chip's ability to calculate in parallel makes it ideal for tasks such as climate modelling. Here, virtual representations of the Earth are broken down into a three-dimensional grid, and mathematical equations can run simultaneously at millions of different points on the grid.
The same holds for medical imaging. A 5-minute functional MRI scan can accumulate tens of millions of three-dimensional units of data, each representing a tiny volume of the brain. This data has to be processed to compensate for, say, head movement, to create a more accurate scan. This can take days to process even with the multiple processing cores in the latest central processing units that allow for some, albeit limited, parallel processing.
Anders Eklund of Link?ping University, Sweden, and colleagues have shown that certain fMRI calculations, which used to take about 24 hours, are wrapped up in as little as 8 minutes using GPUs (Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine, doi.org/fsqz9m). Soon, people who come in for a scan will know the outcome almost instantly. "That's an enormous weight off anybody's mind," says John Owens, a computer scientist at the University of California, Davis.
The CPU is far from dead though: in the past few years, the rise of the multicore processor has given the nerve centre of every computer a new lease of life. The big manufacturers are now doubling up on chips, with designs for chipsets that put both GPU and CPU on the same piece of silicon. These include Intel's latest line, Ivy Bridge, Advanced Micro Devices' Fusion and Nvidia's Denver chips.
GPU-computing can even extend to studying the cosmos. Debbie Bard of Stanford University in California and colleagues have shown that the chips can help crunch the torrents of data that come in from a range of next-generation astronomical instruments. "The larger the data set, the more advantageous it is to use the GPU," she says.
This is just the beginning, predicts Owens. The chips are already finding their way into smartphones and tablets, mostly to power high-resolution screens and applications like 3D mapping. But as GPUs become ubiquitous in mobile devices, they will pave the way for applications that no one has yet thought about. "The future has barely been scratched from this point of view," Owens says.
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