In this short review we present the developments over the last 5 decades thathave led to the use of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for astrophysicalsimulations. Since the introduction of NVIDIA's Compute Unified DeviceArchitecture (CUDA) in 2007 the GPU has become a valuable tool for N-bodysimulations and is so popular these days that almost all papers about highprecision N-body simulations use methods that are accelerated by GPUs. With theGPU hardware becoming more advanced and being used for more advanced algorithmslike gravitational tree-codes we see a bright future for GPU like hardware incomputational astrophysics.
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