high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

Range searching is a primal problem in computational geometry with applications to database systems, mobile computing, geographical information systems, and the like. Defined simply, the problem is to preprocess a given a set of points in a d-dimensional space so that the points that lie inside an orthogonal query rectangle can be efficiently reported. Many practical applications of range trees require one to process a massive amount of points and a massive number of queries. In this context, we propose an efficient parallel implementation of range trees on many-core architectures such as GPUs.We extend our implementation to query processing. While queries can be batched together to exploit inter-query parallelism, we also utilize intra-query parallelism. This inter- and intra-query parallelism greatly reduces the per query latency thereby increasing the throughput. On an input of 1 M points in a 2-dimensional space, our implementation on a single Nvidia GTX 580 GPU for constructing a range tree shows an improvement of 22X over a sequential CPU implementation. We also achieve an average throughput of 10 M queries per second for answering 4 M queries on a range tree containing 1 M points on a Nvidia GTX 580 GPU. We extend our implementation to an application where we seek to report the set of maximal points in a given orthogonal query rectangle.