Parallel Implementation of Irregular Terrain Model on NVIDIA Graphic Processing Units

To improve on the performance of Irregular Terrain Models, researchers at The University of Arizona have investigated the use of multicore processors, such as nVidia's graphics processing units (GPU's) and IBM Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE) to achieve improved ITM performance over mainstream microprocessors. Our researchers were able to reduce the execution time of running ITM processes by a factor of 140x on the GPU platform compared to general purpose processors. Additionally, they demonstrated that by leveraging the GPU platform they were able to achieve cost savings through lower power consumption.

Background:

Irregular Terrain Models (ITM) predict long-term median transmission loss of a radio signal. The model can be applied to various engineering problems such as preliminary estimates for system design, cellular radio telephones, and conventional land mobile systems. In a mobile environment, rapid changes in terrain profiles and radio coverage demands a real time response which requires millions of calculations per second.

Advantages:

• Higher performance over other platforms
• Lower power consumption*lower cost for performance

Applications:

• Dynamic map generation for communications networks
• Ability to rapidly identify unused broadcast/communications spectrum