Glossary term

CUDA

NVIDIA's software platform for running general-purpose computations on its GPUs.

How it works

CUDA is NVIDIA's platform for running general computations on its GPUs. It provides a programming model, compilers and libraries, and frameworks such as PyTorch use it under the hood.

Years of software built on CUDA make it hard for rivals to displace.

The software stack on a GPU

Your model code
Framework (PyTorch, JAX)
CUDA libraries
GPU hardware

Why it matters

CUDA's software ecosystem is a major part of NVIDIA's lead, and rivals invest in alternatives.

Related terms

GPU Tensor core Distributed training