As the programmability and performance of modern GPUs continues to increase, many researchers are looking to graphics hardware to solve problems previously performed on general purpose CPUs. In many cases, performing general purpose computation on graphics hardware can provide a significant advantage over implementations on traditional CPUs. However, if GPUs are to become a powerful processing resource, it is important to establish the correct abstraction of the hardware; this will encourage efficient application design as well as an optimizable interface for hardware designers.

Brook is an extension of standard ANSI C and is designed to incorporate the ideas of data parallel computing and arithmetic intensity into a familiar and efficient language. The general computational model, referred to as streaming, provides two main benefits over traditional conventional languages:

• Data Parallelism: Allows the programmer to specify how to perform the same operations in parallel on different data.
• Arithmetic Intensity: Encourages programmers to specify operations on data which minimize global communication and maximize localized computation.