GPU computation has been a big event in the high-performace computation world for a year or so now. In case you've been living under a rock, GPU supercomputing is the use of the PC graphics card to handle a lot of highly parallel grunt work that multi-core GPUs don't have the sillicon for.
This makes sense, as a GPU is basically a huge number of very simple CPUs strapped together in a low-latency parallel configuration. For many very parallel problems, such as Smooth Particle Hydronamics, this is ideal. Such simulations require high parallelism to compute simple calculations.
The technology harks back to the Connection Machine back in the 80s, a time when the world was pure and more simple. This was basically a vast collection of very simple processors. The idea behind it was to directly simulate a problem at hand, rather then crunch the number of a mathematical model. The classic example of a Connection Machione problem was Conway's Game of Life, the wonderful board game that, true to its name, spawned a wonder range of bizarre behaviour from simple parallel rules.
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