A general-purpose programming environment allows users to program a GPU as a general-purpose computation engine using familiar C/C++ programming constructs. Users may use declaration specifiers to identify which portions of a program are to be compiled for a CPU or a GPU. Specifically, functions, objects and variables may be specified for GPU binary compilation using declaration specifiers. A compiler separates the GPU binary code and the CPU binary code in a source file using the declaration specifiers. The location of objects and variables in different memory locations in the system may be identified using the declaration specifiers. CTA threading information is also provided for the GPU to support parallel processing.