Charles, I am not sure if you knew this or not. But nVidia seems to have written a language to create programs that use the power of the gpu for researchers. Since you are low level power coder, you might want to check this out. You have I think access to over 100 cores in the gpu at the moment
It is called Cuda. Here is the link:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_what_is.html
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