Abstract
Surface roughness is description of the surface micro topography of randomness or irregular. The standard deviation of surface height and the surface correlation length describe the statistical variation for the random component of a surface height relative to a reference surface. When the number of data points is large, calculation of surface roughness parameters is time-consuming. With the advent of Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) architectures, inherently parallel problem can be effectively solved using GPUs. In this paper we propose a GPU-based massively parallel computing method for 2D bare soil surface roughness estimation. This method was applied to the data collected by the surface roughness tester based on the laser triangulation principle during the field experiment in April 2012. The total number of data points was 52,040. It took 47 seconds on a Fermi GTX 590 GPU whereas its serial CPU version took 5422 seconds, leading to a significant 115x speedup.
Highlights
Surface roughness is a description of the randomness or irregularity of the microtopography
In this paper we propose a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)-based massively parallel computing method for 2D bare soil surface roughness estimation
We reached a speedup factor of 115x as compared to the single threaded CPU version when GPU I/O transfer is taken into account
Summary
Surface roughness is a description of the randomness or irregularity of the microtopography. Tang [7] obtained soil roughness parameters through digital image processing method. Our lab presented a surface roughness testing that features rapid testing speed and high testing precision, requires no manual work and obtains 3D parameters for the surface [13]. It has the similar principle with Lidar, but easier and quicker. Calculations of the soil roughness parameters based on these data points present a huge work and require a large computing time. In this paper we propose a GPU-based massively parallel computing method for 2D bare soil surface roughness estimation. We reached a speedup factor of 115x as compared to the single threaded CPU version when GPU I/O transfer is taken into account
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