With the recent news release from NASA about the Mars Curiosity rover, and as a continuation of our previous post “Powering Mars Research”, Brendan Babb is here again to provide us with an exciting look into Jacket’s role in Mars research from the Curiosity rover . Brendan Babb and colleague Frank Moore, at the University of Alaska in Anchorage, work with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab to improve image quality and image compression of the Mars Rover images. Here is what Brendan had to tell us about the use of Jacket in his GPU computing challenges… Brendan Babb: I was thrilled to watch the new Mars Rover Curiosity successful landing with my visiting nieces and nephews. The new rover will take pictures, …
Powering Mars Research
The Curiosity Mars rover landing reminded us of a recent talk by Brendan Babb of NASA and UAA in Anchorage about Jacket-accelerated Mars research. The talk was given at GTC 2012 in May. The main thrust of this research is improving mars rover image compression via GPUs and genetic algorithms. With Jacket and GPUs, the researchers were able to achieve 5X speedups on the larger data sizes. The algorithm works by pairing neighboring pixels with a random one and then adjusting the random pixel based on whether it incrementally improves the original image. Babb described the algorithm as an “embarrassingly” parallel process, ideally suited to GPU acceleration. He estimates he has been able to achieve a 20 to 30 percent error …