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Weather radar data processing on graphic cards

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Abstract

Weather radar operation generates data at a high rate that requires prompt processing. The operations performed on data for weather product generation are repeated in each resolution cell and thus are naturally prone to parallelization. Parallel processing using graphic cards is an emerging technology that allows for implementation of high-throughput algorithms at a low cost. In this paper, the parallel implementation of the main product of a polarimetric weather radar using GPU is presented, focusing on its optimization. A speedup exceeding 20\(\times \) is obtained when compared to the serial implementation. Also processing is found to be memory bound, which results in a counter-intuitive performance improvement when the number of threads per job is reduced.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratorio de Procesamiento de Señales Aplicado y Computación de Alto Rendimiento (LaPAC), Universidad Nacional de Río Negro, Sede Andina, San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina

    Mónica Denham, Enrico Lamperti & Javier Areta

  2. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas CONICET, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Mónica Denham & Javier Areta

Authors
  1. Mónica Denham
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  2. Enrico Lamperti
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  3. Javier Areta
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Correspondence to Mónica Denham.

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Denham, M., Lamperti, E. & Areta, J. Weather radar data processing on graphic cards. J Supercomput 74, 868–885 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-017-2166-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-017-2166-8

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