Parallel Thread Execution

Parallel Thread Execution (PTX or NVPTX) is a low-level parallel thread execution virtual machine and instruction set architecture used in Nvidia's CUDA programming environment. The NVCC compiler translates code written in CUDA, a C++-like language, into PTX instructions (an assembly language represented as ASCII text), and the graphics driver contains a compiler which translates the PTX instructions into the executable binary code which can be run on the processing cores of Nvidia GPUs. The GNU Compiler Collection also has basic ability for PTX generation in the context of OpenMP offloading. Inline PTX assembly can be used in CUDA.