Comparison of design and performance of snow cover computing on GPUs and multi-core processors

  • Authors:
  • Ladislav Huraj;Vladimír Siládi;Jozef Siláči

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Applied Informatics, University of SS. Cyril and Methodius in Trnava, Trnava, Slovak Republic;Department of Computer Science, University of Matej Bel, Slovak Republic;Department of Computer Science, University of Matej Bel, Slovak Republic

  • Venue:
  • WSEAS Transactions on Information Science and Applications
  • Year:
  • 2010

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

The aim of this work is the depth of the snow cover computing in the desired point based on the geographical characteristics of a specific geographical point in a modeled area. The measured data are known on few places. These places are coincident with raingauge stations. These data have been collected by many continuous observations and measurements at the specific climatologic raingauging stations of Slovak Hydrometeorogical Institute. An interpolation method is necessary to obtain a representation of real situation about whole surface. The main characteristic of the interpolation computing is the fact that it is time-consuming. In paper, we present two cheap approaches of HPC. The first solution is a utilization of graphics processing units (GPUs) where the availability of enormous computational performance of easily programmable GPUs can rapidly decrease time of computing. The second one is a utilization of multithread CPUs. In our article we demonstrate how to deploy the CUDA architecture, which utilizes the powerful parallel computation capacity of GPU, to accelerate computational process of snow cover depth using the inversedistance weighting (IDW) method. The performance of GPU we face with OpenMP implementation of IDW method. We consider variable number of threads per CPU. The outputs are visualized by the GIS Grass tool.