Yes, multiple such attempts, including complete languages. Very thin hardware support as different GPUs varied very much on what could be done. GeForce 8 intro

Yes, multiple such attempts, including complete languages. Very thin hardware support as different GPUs varied very much on what could be done. GeForce 8 introduced CUDA because graphics pipeline similarly evolved into position where instead of forcing the use of dedicated cores for specific tasks (vector and fragment shaders) due to simple economies of chip making, the Shader Model 4 introducing yet another stage justified making unified shader cores... which could be just as easily used for other tasks.