Computation of Troposphere Slant Delays on a GPU

Abstract

The computation of ray-traced troposphere delays which can be utilized for space geodetic applications is a time-consuming effort when a large number of rays has to be calculated. On the other hand, computation time can be tremendously reduced when algorithms are capable of supporting parallel processing architectures. Thus, by the use of an off-the-shelf graphics processing unit (GPU), it is demonstrated that troposphere slant delays can be computed very efficiently, without loss of accuracy. An adopted ray-tracing algorithm is presented, and results from GPU computations are compared with those obtained from calculations on a standard personal computer's CPU.