High Performance Processing and Analysis of Geospatial Data Using CUDA on GPU

Abstract

In this paper, the high-performance processing of massive geospatial data on many-core GPU (Graphic Processing Unit) is presented. We use CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) programming framework to implement parallel processing of common Geographic Information Systems (GIS) algorithms, such as viewshed analysis and map-matching. Experimental evaluation indicates the improvement in performance with respect to CPU-based solutions and shows feasibility of using GPU and CUDA for parallel implementation of GIS algorithms over large-scale geospatial datasets.

Keywords

• high performance computing
• geographic information systems
• multiprocessing systems
• parallel programming
• performance analysis