CUDA-Based Radiative Transfer Method with Application to the EM Scattering from a Two-Layer Canopy Model

Abstract

In step with the great efforts to find out the scattering contributions of a large number of samples in the vegetation canopy, intensive computational burden occurs and obviously lames the application of the traditional serial algorithm on the basis of the radiative transfer theory to evaluate the electromagnetic (EM) scattering from vegetations. Nevertheless, the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) gives developers access to the virtual instruction set and memory of the parallel computational elements in the CUDA compatible Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), which encourages us to develop a CUDA-based simulator for the solution. This paper analyzes the radiative transfer method and the CUDA architecture, and then presents a CUDA parallel algorithm for calculating the EM scattering from a two-layer vegetation canopy. In the CUDA-based simulation, with a GTS250 GPU as, which has 128 stream processors, coprocessor, tens of times speedup is obtained in comparison with the original serial algorithm.