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+
+This book is intended to present the design of significant scientific
+applications on GPUs. Scientific applications require more and more
+computational power in a large vaariety of fields: biology, physics,
+chemisty, phenomon model and prediction, simulation, mathematics, ...
+
+In order to be able to handle more complex applications, the use of
+parallel architectures is the solution to decrease the execution
+times of theses applications. Using simulataneously many computing
+cores can significantly speed up the processing time.
+
+Nevertheless using parallel architectures is not so easy and has
+always required an endeavor to parallelize an application. Nowadays
+with general purpose graphics processing units (GPGPU), it is possible
+to use either general graphic cards or dedicated graphic cards to benefit from
+the computational power of all the cores available inside these
+cards. The NVidia company introduced CUDA in 2007 to unify the
+programming model to use their video card. CUDA is currently the most
+used environment for designing GPU applications although some
+alternatives are available, for example OpenCL. According to
+applications and the GPU considered, a speed up from 5 up to 50 or even more can be
+expected using a GPU instead of computing with a CPU.
+
+The programming model of GPU is quite different from the one of
+CPU. It is well adapted to data parallelism applications. Several
+books present the CUDA programming models and multi-core applications
+design. This book is only focused on scientific applications on GPUs. It
+contains 19 chapters gathered in 5 parts.
+
+The first part presents the GPUs. The second part focuses on two
+significant image processing applications on GPUs. Part three presents
+two general methodologies for software development on GPUs. Part four
+describes three optmitization problems on GPUs. The fifth part, the
+longuest one, presents 7 numerical applications. Finally part six
+illustrates 3 other applications that are not included in the previous
+parts.
+
+Some codes presented in this book are available online on my webpage:
+http://members.femto-st.fr/raphael-couturier/gpu-book/.
