Nonlinear optimization problems arise in all industries. Accelerating optimization solvers is desirable. Efforts have been made to accelerate interior point methods for large scale problems. However, since the interior point algorithm used requires many function evaluations, the acceleration of the algorithm becomes less beneficial. We introduce a way to accelerate the sequential quadratic programming method, which is characterized by minimizing function evaluations, on graphical processing units. This talk is co-authored with Xiukun Hu, Robert Lumley, and Mookwon Seo.