NVIDIA NTERSECT – April 2010 – The World is Parallel

Web mapping services and programs such as Google Earth have made all of us users of satellite images that not very long ago were available mainly to government intelligence agencies. There is a great deal more to these images than meets the eye, and extracting that information turns out to be a major computational challenge. But like most problems involving graphical data, the processing of remote sensing data such as satellite imagery is ideally suited for parallel processing and can be accomplished at relatively low cost by doing much of the computation on graphics processing units.