NVIDIA is a company name you may not recognize (unless you’re a gamer), but it’s managing to do some of the most interesting graphics chipset work out there for motherboards and video cards. Some of the brands include GeForce, GoForce, Quadro and nForce. Now, you should add supercomputing to the work that NVIDIA is putting its imprint on. Popular Science just recognized its CUDA with a “best of what’s new” award.

The Cuda is a C language software development kit that can help a programmer transform a “graphics processing unit” (GPU) into a supercomputer. These are the devices that scientists and researchers rely on for computing jobs that require massive amounts of calculations. Frequently, they involve parallel processing — where a number of CPUs are applied in tandem to the work.

With CUDA you can turn your notebook to that kind of computing work because it can get threads on NVIDIA GPUs to work together in solving a problem. The programming kit includes examples for performing matrix multiplication, image convolution, Monte-Carlo option pricing and plenty of other samples on topics about which I have no clue.

I don’t know how this computing power will manifest, but no doubt somebody will create an application that will enable ordinary mortals to restart hearts with a cell phone and remove calories from Thanksgiving dinner via the family room Wii.