The CPU (central processing unit) has long been explained as the brain of the personal computer but over the past decade, that brain has been enhanced by another component – the GPU (graphics processing unit.) The GPU’s advanced capabilities, which rely on parallel processing – where independent calculations are executed simultaneously – were originally used primarily for 3D game rendering. But now those capabilities have been harnessed more broadly to accelerate computational workloads in areas from astronomy and astrophysics to medical imaging.