Signal Processing for a Reverse-GPS Wildlife Tracking System: CPU and GPU Implementation Experiences

TL;DR

This paper compares CPU and GPU implementations of signal processing for wildlife tracking, showing GPU significantly boosts performance and power efficiency, enabling more effective and scalable animal monitoring systems.

Contribution

It introduces and evaluates GPU-based signal processing implementations for wildlife tracking, demonstrating substantial performance and power efficiency improvements over CPU methods.

Findings

GPU implementation improves performance by over 50X

GPU reduces power consumption by nearly 5X

Performance-per-Watt improves by more than 16X

Abstract

We present robust high-performance implementations of signal-processing tasks performed by a high-throughput wildlife tracking system called ATLAS. The system tracks radio transmitters attached to wild animals by estimating the time of arrival of radio packets to multiple receivers (base stations). Time-of-arrival estimation of wideband radio signals is computationally expensive, especially in acquisition mode (when the time of transmission is not known, not even approximately). These computations are a bottleneck that limits the throughput of the system. We developed a sequential high-performance CPU implementation of the computations a few years back, and more recencely a GPU implementation. Both strive to balance performance with simplicity, maintainability, and development effort, as most real-world codes do. The paper reports on the two implementations and carefully evaluates their performance. The evaluations indicates that the GPU implementation dramatically improves performance and power-performance relative to the sequential CPU implementation running on a desktop CPU typical of the computers in current base stations. Performance improves by more than 50X on a high-end GPU and more than 4X with a GPU platform that consumes almost 5 times less power than the CPU platform. Performance-per-Watt ratios also improve (by more than 16X), and so do the price-performance ratios.