General Purpose GPU technology is becoming mature, it has been applied in many industry areas. However, due to the differences of computing ability between CPU and GPU, the study of GPU in petroleum industry application should be developed effectively. In this article, we introduce the General Purpose GPU technology and propose a method to realize pre‐stack time migration software on GPU. Compared with traditional pre‐stack time migration running on Personal Computer (PC) or PC‐Cluster, the new programming method greatly improves computational efficiency, and then dramatically save computing and maintenance cost. The actual tests with real seismic data illustrate that high performance computing based on General Purpose GPU technology (GPGPU) is an important direction of developments to meet the requirements of large scale computing in petroleum industry.