Calculating the Fire Weather Index for US wildfires using a GPU

The Forest Fire Weather Index allows the assessment of fire danger using weather variables in order to increase preparedness to prevent or halt the spread of wildfires. It often needs to be computed over large areas, taking weather data from hundreds of thousands of stations. CUDA parallel programming can be used to do this more efficiently. This paper presents a CPU and a GPU version as a solution to this problem, using historic datasets of wildfires and weather in the US to measure performance.