The report "A Survey of General-Purpose Computation on Graphics Hardware" by Owens, Luebke, Govindaraju, and others, published in 2005, explores the rapid advancements in graphics hardware and its growing programmability, making it a compelling platform for computationally demanding tasks. The authors motivate the use of general-purpose computation on graphics processors (GPGPU) by highlighting the powerful and inexpensive nature of modern GPUs, their flexibility and programmability, and the challenges and limitations of using GPUs for general-purpose tasks. They provide an overview of the hardware and software developments that have led to the recent interest in GPGPU, including the evolution of the graphics pipeline and the introduction of programmable hardware. The report is divided into several sections, covering the motivation for GPGPU, the programmable hardware, the GPU programming model, programming systems, and various techniques for efficient GPGPU applications. Key topics include the stream programming model, high-level shading languages, debugging tools, and specific techniques such as map, reduce, scatter and gather, stream filtering, sort, and search operations. The authors also discuss the limitations of current GPUs, such as the lack of integer data operands and double precision arithmetic, and the challenges of applying non-graphics tasks to GPUs. The report concludes with a survey of the latest applications of GPGPU, ranging from numeric computing and computer graphics processes to physical simulations and database operations, highlighting the potential benefits of harnessing the power of GPUs for scientific and general-purpose computation.The report "A Survey of General-Purpose Computation on Graphics Hardware" by Owens, Luebke, Govindaraju, and others, published in 2005, explores the rapid advancements in graphics hardware and its growing programmability, making it a compelling platform for computationally demanding tasks. The authors motivate the use of general-purpose computation on graphics processors (GPGPU) by highlighting the powerful and inexpensive nature of modern GPUs, their flexibility and programmability, and the challenges and limitations of using GPUs for general-purpose tasks. They provide an overview of the hardware and software developments that have led to the recent interest in GPGPU, including the evolution of the graphics pipeline and the introduction of programmable hardware. The report is divided into several sections, covering the motivation for GPGPU, the programmable hardware, the GPU programming model, programming systems, and various techniques for efficient GPGPU applications. Key topics include the stream programming model, high-level shading languages, debugging tools, and specific techniques such as map, reduce, scatter and gather, stream filtering, sort, and search operations. The authors also discuss the limitations of current GPUs, such as the lack of integer data operands and double precision arithmetic, and the challenges of applying non-graphics tasks to GPUs. The report concludes with a survey of the latest applications of GPGPU, ranging from numeric computing and computer graphics processes to physical simulations and database operations, highlighting the potential benefits of harnessing the power of GPUs for scientific and general-purpose computation.