A high performance GPU implementation of Surface Energy Balance System (SEBS) based on CUDA-C

  • Authors:

  • Mohammad Abouali;Joris Timmermans;Jose E. Castillo;Bob Z. Su

  • Affiliations:

  • Computational Science Research Center at San Diego State University, 5500 Campanile Drive, San Diego, CA 92182-1245, USA;Faculty of Geo-information Science and Earth Observation at University of Twente, Hengelosestraat 99, 7514 AE, Enschede, The Netherlands;Computational Science Research Center at San Diego State University, 5500 Campanile Drive, San Diego, CA 92182-1245, USA;Faculty of Geo-information Science and Earth Observation at University of Twente, Hengelosestraat 99, 7514 AE, Enschede, The Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • Environmental Modelling & Software
  • Year:
  • 2013

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

This paper introduces a new implementation of the Surface Energy Balance System (SEBS) algorithm harnessing the many cores available on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). This new implementation uses Compute Unified Device Architecture C (CUDA-C) programming model and is designed to be executed on a system equipped with NVIDIA^(R)'s graphic cards. The output of the new implementation is compared to a MATLAB code that has already been fully tested in the Water Cycle Multimission Observation Strategy (WACMOS) project. The code is timed against both MATLAB and a purely high-performance C implementation of the same algorithm. The code has been tested on several different NVIDIA^(R) cards, with different compute capabilities. The authors have decided to provide the entire source code to the scientific community free of charge; hence, at the end, the instruction on how to obtain the code is also presented.