Fast map projection on CUDA

Map projection is a key task in cartography that transforms the geographical coordinates from one coordinate system to another. It has been widely used in the Geographic Information System application. However, map projection is a very time-consuming task, and fast processing speed is often required in interactive G1S scenarios. Parallel computation provides an opportunity to reduce run times. Nowadays, with the Common Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) becoming a new programming approach of the general purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU), map projection can be accelerated by fully utilizing the computing power of this revolutionary technology. In this paper, we present an innovative implementation of this compute-intensive operation. We also explain the parallel characteristics of the graphics processing units (GPU) through the work assignment. The result shows our optimized implementation can obtain at least 6x to 8x speedups over a very similar single-threaded CPU implementation.