high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

Satellite-observed radiance is a nonlinear functional of surface properties and atmospheric temperature and absorbing gas profiles as described by the radiative transfer equation (RTE). In the era of hyperspectral sounders with thousands of high-resolution channels, the computation of the radiative transfer model becomes more time-consuming. The radiative transfer model performance in operational numerical weather prediction systems still limits the number of channels we can use in hyperspectral sounders to only a few hundreds. To take the full advantage of such high resolution infrared observations, a computationally efficient radiative transfer model is needed to facilitate satellite data assimilation. In recent years the programmable commodity Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) has evolved into a highly parallel, multithreaded, many-core processor with tremendous computational speed and very high memory bandwidth. The radiative transfer model is very suitable for the GPU implementation to take advantage of the hardware