Evaluating the power of GPU acceleration for IDW interpolation algorithm

Abstract

We first present two GPU implementations of the standard Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW) interpolation algorithm, the tiled version that takes advantage of shared memory and the CDP version that is implemented using CUDA Dynamic Parallelism (CDP). Then we evaluate the power of GPU acceleration for IDW interpolation algorithm by comparing the performance of CPU implementation with three GPU implementations, that is, the naive version, the tiled version, and the CDP version. Experimental results show that the tilted version has the speedups of 120x and 670x over the CPU version when the power parameter p is set to 2 and 3.0, respectively. In addition, compared to the naive GPU implementation, the tiled version is about two times faster. However, the CDP version is 4.8x ∼ 6.0x slower than the naive GPU version, and therefore does not have any potential advantages in practical applications. © 2014 Gang Mei.