Search for: All records

Geometric intersection algorithms are fundamental in spatial analysis in Geographic Information System (GIS). Applying high performance computing to perform geometric intersection on huge amount of spatial data to get real-time results is necessary. Given two input geometries (polygon or polyline) of a candidate pair, we introduce a new two-step geospatial filter that first creates sketches of the geometries and uses it to detect workload and then refines the sketches by the common areas of sketches to decrease the overall computations in the refine phase. We call this filter PolySketch-based CMBR (PSCMBR) filter. We show the application of this filter in speeding-up line segment intersections (LSI) reporting task that is a basic computation in a variety of geospatial applications like polygon overlay and spatial join. We also developed a parallel PolySketch-based PNP filter to perform PNP tests on GPU which reduces computational workload in PNP tests. Finally, we integrated these new filters to the hierarchical filter and refinement (HiFiRe) system to solve geometric intersection problem. We have implemented the new filter and refine system on GPU using CUDA. The new filters introduced in this paper reduce more computational workload when compared to existing filters. As a result, we get on average 7.96X speedup compared to our prior version of HiFiRe system. 

Due to the developments of topographic techniques, clear satellite imagery, and various means for collecting information, geospatial datasets are growing in volume, complexity, and heterogeneity. For efficient execution of spatial computations and analytics on large spatial data sets, parallel processing is required. To exploit fine-grained parallel processing in large scale compute clusters, partitioning in a load-balanced way is necessary for skewed datasets. In this work, we focus on spatial join operation where the inputs are two layers of geospatial data. Our partitioning method for spatial join uses Adaptive Partitioning (ADP) technique, which is based on Quadtree partitioning. Unlike existing partitioning techniques, ADP partitions the spatial join workload instead of partitioning the individual datasets separately to provide better load-balancing. Based on our experimental evaluation, ADP partitions spatial data in a more balanced way than Quadtree partitioning and Uniform grid partitioning. ADP uses an output-sensitive duplication avoidance technique which minimizes duplication of geometries that are not part of spatial join output. In a distributed memory environment, this technique can reduce data communication and storage requirements compared to traditional methods. To improve the performance of ADP, an MPI+Threads based parallelization is presented. With ParADP, a pair of real world datasets, one with 717 million polylines and another with 10 million polygons, is partitioned into 65,536 grid cells within 7 seconds. ParADP performs well with both good weak scaling up to 4,032 CPU cores and good strong scaling up to 4,032 CPU cores. 

In this paper, we introduce our hierarchical filter and refinement technique that we have developed for parallel geometric intersection operations involving large polygons and polylines. The inputs are two layers of large polygonal datasets and the computations are spatial intersection on a pair of cross-layer polygons. These intersections are the compute-intensive spatial data analytic kernels in spatial join and map overlay computations. We have extended the classical filter and refine algorithms using PolySketch Filter to improve the performance of geospatial computations. In addition to filtering polygons by their Minimum Bounding Rectangle (MBR), our hierarchical approach explores further filtering using tiles (smaller MBRs) to increase the effectiveness of filtering and decrease the computational workload in the refinement phase. We have implemented this filter and refine system on CPU and GPU by using OpenMP and OpenACC. After using R-tree, on average, our filter technique can still discard 69% of polygon pairs which do not have segment intersection points. PolySketch filter reduces on average 99.77% of the workload of finding line segment intersections. PNP based task reduction and Striping algorithms filter out on average 95.84% of the workload of Point-in-Polygon tests. Our CPU-GPU system performs spatial join on two shapefiles, namely USA Water Bodies and USA Block Group Boundaries with 683K polygons in about 10 seconds using NVidia Titan V and Titan Xp GPU. 

Voronoi diagram construction is a common and fundamental problem in computational geometry and spatial computing. Numerous sequential and parallel algorithms for Voronoi diagram construction exists in literature. This paper presents a multi-threaded approach where we augment an existing sequential implementation of Fortune’s planesweep algorithm with compiler directives. The novelty of our fine-grained parallel algorithm lies in exploiting the concurrency available at each event point encountered during the algorithm. On the Intel Xeon E5 CPU, our shared-memory parallelization with OpenMP achieves around 2x speedup compared to the sequential implementation using datasets containing 2k-128k sites. 

We are in the era of Spatial Big Data. Due to the developments of topographic techniques, clear satellite imagery, and various means for collecting information, geospatial datasets are growing in volume, complexity and heterogeneity. For example, OpenStreetMap data for the whole world is about 1 TB and NASA world climate datasets are about 17 TB. Spatial data volume and variety makes spatial computations both data-intensive and compute-intensive. Due to the irregular distribution of spatial data, domain decomposition becomes challenging. In this work, we present spatial data partitioning technique that takes into account spatial join cost. In addition, we present spatial join computation using Asynchronous Dynamic Load Balancing (ADLB) library. ADLB is a software library designed to help rapidly build scalable parallel programs using MPI. We evaluated the performance of ADLB-based MPI-GIS implementation. In our existing work, spatial data movement cost from ADLB server to worker MPI processes limited the scalability of MPI-GIS. 

Line segment intersection is one of the elementary operations in computational geometry. Complex problems in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) like finding map overlays or spatial joins using polygonal data require solving segment intersections. Plane sweep paradigm is used for finding geometric intersection in an efficient manner. However, it is difficult to parallelize due to its in-order processing of spatial events. We present a new fine-grained parallel algorithm for geometric intersection and its CPU and GPU implementation using OpenMP and OpenACC. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work demonstrating an effective parallelization of plane sweep on GPUs. We chose compiler directive based approach for implementation because of its simplicity to parallelize sequential code. Using Nvidia Tesla P100 GPU, our implementation achieves around 40X speedup for line segment intersection problem on 40K and 80K data sets compared to sequential CGAL library. 

In recent times, geospatial datasets are growing in terms of size, complexity and heterogeneity. High performance systems are needed to analyze such data to produce actionable insights in an efficient manner. For polygonal a.k.a vector datasets, operations such as I/O, data partitioning, communication, and load balancing becomes challenging in a cluster environment. In this work, we present MPI-Vector-IO, a parallel I/O library that we have designed using MPI-IO specifically for partitioning and reading irregular vector data formats such as Well Known Text. It makes MPI aware of spatial data, spatial primitives and provides support for spatial data types embedded within collective computation and communication using MPI message-passing library. These abstractions along with parallel I/O support are useful for parallel Geographic Information System (GIS) application development on HPC platforms. Performance evaluation is done on Lustre and GPFS filesystems. MPI-Vector-IO scales well with MPI processes and file size and achieves bandwidth up to 22 GB/s for common spatial data access patterns. We observed that independent file read functions performed better than collective functions in MPI-IO for contiguous access pattern on Lustre. In general, the I/O is improved by one to two orders of magnitude over real-world datasets using up to 1152 CPU cores. Spatial Join query is used as an exemplar to demonstrate an end-to-end application using MPI-Vector-IO.