GPUs can speed up the kernel of operating systems. KGPU is a framework for calling GPU code from the Linux kernel. Here are some kernel tasks than can be accelerated by the GPU:
-- network packet processing;
-- in-kernel cryptography (IPSec, encrypted filesystems);
-- pattern matching (the GPU can accelerate regular expression matching, with speedups of up to 48x reported over CPU implementations);
-- basic algorithms: sort, search and graph analysis;
KGPU is implemented using NVIDIA CUDA. To demonstrate the feasibility of KGPU, the AES encryption algorithm has been implemented as a service on the GPU for the Linux crypto subsystem. When the size of data is larger than 8KB, the GPU (a GTX 480) outperforms the CPU (Core i7-930).
Source: http://code.google.com/p/kgpu/
