High performance image processing of satellite images using graphics processing units

This paper presents preliminary results of studies concerning possibilities of high performance processing of satellite images using graphics processing units. Even if numerical procedures used for this kind of computation are not complicated and fast, size of typical satellite scene makes them time consuming. This problem is especially troublesome when many, sometimes hundredths of scenes, have to be processed in one computational task. At the present state of the study, using distributed GPU-based computational infrastructure allows to reduce time of typical computation 5 to 6 times. It should be stressed that these results were obtained using three old CUD A 2.1 NVIDIA Quadro 1600M card cluster which efficiency cannot be compared to efficiency of modern CPUs.