= History =
Although GPUs were invented In the very early history of video processors, chips such as the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANTIC ANTIC ] or [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_Chip_Set#Denise Denise] would take a lot of the mechanics of video processing (waiting for scanlines and processing other TV or monitor signals). 3d modeling and graphics would become popular in the late 1990s early 90s, and eventually modern 3d accelerator cards such as the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voodoo2 3dfx Voodoo2] were designed to accelerate 3d simulations, they math. These 3d accelerator cards drew upon a rich history of vector-compute and SIMD-compute from 1980s and 1970s supercomputers. As such, many publications relating to Cray-vector supercomputers or the Connection Machine supercomputer easily apply to modern GPUs. For example, all the algorithms described in the 1986 publication "[https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=7903 Data Parallel Algorithms]" can be efficiently executed on a modern GPU workgroup (roughly ~256x GPU threads). The Data Parallel Algorithms paper is a beginner-level algorithms paper, demonstrating simple and efficient parallel-prefix sum, parallel-linked list traversal, parallel RegEx matching on the 4096x parallel Connection Machine-2 supercomputer.
Modern papers on GPUs, such as NVidia's excellent [https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch39.html Chapter 39. Parallel Prefix Sum (Scan) with CUDA (GPU Gems 3)], are built on top of these papers from the 1980s or 1990s. As such, the beginner will find it far easier to read the papers from the 1980s or 90s before attempting to read a modern piece like GPU Gems 3.
