A high performance GPU implementation of Surface Energy Balance System (SEBS) based on CUDA-C

This paper introduces a new implementation of the Surface Energy Balance System (SEBS) algorithm harnessing the many cores available on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). This new implementation uses Compute Unified Device Architecture C (CUDA-C) programming model and is designed to be executed on a system equipped with NVIDIA®'s graphic cards. The output of the new implementation is compared to a MATLAB code that has already been fully tested in the Water Cycle Multimission Observation Strategy (WACMOS) project. The code is timed against both MATLAB and a purely high-performance C implementation of the same algorithm. The code has been tested on several different NVIDIA® cards, with different compute capabilities. The authors have decided to provide the entire source code to the scientific community free of charge; hence, at the end, the instruction on how to obtain the code is also presented