GPU computing is the use of a GPU (graphics processing unit) as a co-processor to accelerate CPUs for general-purpose scientific and engineering computing.
The GPU accelerates applications running on the CPU by offloading some of the compute-intensive and time consuming portions of the code. The rest of the application still runs on the CPU. From a user’s perspective, the application runs faster because it’s using the massively parallel processing power of the GPU to boost performance. This is known as “heterogeneous” or “hybrid” computing.