Using GPU Programming for Inverse Spectroscopy
The Idaho National Laboratory (INL) has developed a detector that relies heavily on computationally expensive inverse spectroscopy algorithms to determine probabilistic three dimensional mappings of the source and its intensity. This inverse spectroscopy algorithm applies to material accountability due to the potential to determine where nuclear sources are present as a function of time and space. And yet because the novel algorithm can become prohibitively expensive on a standard desktop PC, the INL has incorporated new hardware from the commercial graphics community. General programming for graphics processing units (GPUs) is not a new concept. However, the application of GPUs to evidence theory-based inverse spectroscopy is both novel and particularly apropos. Improvements while using a (slightly upgraded) standard PC are approximately three orders of magnitude, making a ten hour computation in less than four seconds. This significantly changes the concept of prohibitively expensive calculations and makes application to materials accountability possible in near real time. Indeed, the sensor collection time is now expected to dominate the time required to determine the source and its intensity, instead of the inverse spectroscopy method.