Parallel Processing of Remotely Sensed Hyperspectral Images On Heterogeneous Networks of Workstations Using HeteroMPI

Abstract

The development of efficient techniques for transforming massive volumes of remotely sensed hyperspectral data into scientific understanding is critical for space-based Earth science and planetary exploration. Although most available parallel processing strategies for information extraction and mining from hyperspectral imagery assume homogeneity in the underlying computing platform, heterogeneous networks of computers (HNOCs) have become a promising cost-effective solution, expected to play a major role in many on-going and planned remote sensing missions. In this paper, we develop a new morphological parallel algorithm for hyperspectral image classification using HeteroMPI, an extension of MPI for programming high-performance computations on HNOCs. The main idea of HeteroMPI is to automate and optimize the selection of a group of processes that executes a heterogeneous algorithm faster than any other possible group in a heterogeneous environment. In order to analyze the impact of many-to-one (gather) communication operations introduced by our proposed algorithm, we resort to a recently proposed collective communication model. The parallel algorithm is validated using two heterogeneous clusters at University College Dublin and a massively parallel Beowulf cluster at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.