CUDA IMPLEMENTATION IN THE EM SCATTERING OF A THREE-LAYER CANOPY

Calculating the EM scattering fields from a three-layer canopy which comprises of many leaves, trunks and the ground needs intensive computational burden, when the area becomes large and obviously lames the application of the traditional serial algorithm. With the development of graphics hardware, the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) can be used to calculate the electromagnetic (EM) scattering problems parallelly. In this paper, the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) is combined with the four-path method and the reciprocity theorem to predict the EM scattering properties from scatterers which are sampled by using Monte-Carlo method in a three-layer canopy model. We get a highest speedup of 294 times in comparison with the original serial algorithm on a Core (TM) i5 CPU with a GTS460 GPU as a coprocessor.