New alternative to geophysical high performance computing: GPU Computing.

With the increasing demands in geophysical computing, the scales of cluster systems have been continuously increasing, which complicates the system construction, operation, maintenance, management, and software development. Fortunately, with the rapid development of microelectronic technologies, cluster is likely to be replaced by reconfigurable computing and GPU computing as mainstream technologies of HPC in the near future. With its powerful parallel processing performance, GPU can act as computing accelerator or engine in general computing platform based on CPUs and provide significant power of scientific computation and high performance/price ratio. Products and software development environment are available to GPU computing. GPU computing will be widely applied in geophysical computing in the near future.