Hacking video cards is "fantasy"

One of the gripes and rips I hear by "nerds" on my book "Houdini scientist" is that you can't hack video cards and use them as a powerful parallel co-proccessor for computers.

Wrong.

http://thehackernews.com/2010/10/worlds-fastest-supercomputer-built.html?m=1

This supercomputer was built on the power of video chips for China.

And then there's this...

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/1280093554/Graphics-card-supercomputers-render-passwords-pointless

And this...

http://m.gizmodo.com/5061763/hackers-use-nvidia-graphics-card-to-smash-wi+fi-encryption-10000-percent-faster

What most misunderstand is that, today, graphics cards Are a computer all unto themselves. The GPU is powerful, fast, and has Mega and gigabytes of built in memory. Its the little computer inside the big computer and 99.99% of the time its in idle.