Parallel cuda implementation of conflict detection for application to airspace deconfliction

Abstract

Methods for maintaining separation between aircraft in the current airspace system rely heavily on human operators. A conflict is an event in which two or more aircraft experience a loss of minimum allowable separation. Interest has grown in developing more advanced automation tools to predict when a traffic conflict is going to occur and to assist in its resolution. The term air space deconfliction is used to describe the resolution of conflicts after they have been predicted or detected. Due to the computationally intensive character of conflict detection and airspace deconfliction, as well as their data parallel nature, they are naturally amenable to parallel processing. This work discusses a parallel implementation of a conflict detection algorithm for application to airspace deconfliction. It uses the NVIDIA Quadro FX 5800 B Elizabeth Thompson 123 3788 E. Thompson et al. and the Tesla C1060 graphical processing units (GPUs) in conjunction with the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) hardware/software architecture. Details of the implementation are discussed, including the use of streams for asynchronous programming and the use of multiple GPUs. The performance of the parallel implementation is compared to that of an equivalent sequential version and shown to exhibit improvement in execution time. Recommendations are provided to further improve performance of the algorithm.