A GPU-Accelerated Approach to Static Stability Assessments for Pallet Loading in Air Cargo

The static stability constraint is one of the most important constraints in pallet loading and plays a substantial role when assembling safe and loadable palletizing layouts. Current approaches reach their limits as soon as additional complexity is added, which is a given in the practice of air cargo logistics, or when performance becomes important. As our central objective, we explore a new approach to calculate static stability more performantly and to cover more complexity by relaxing several simplifying assumptions. The approach is implemented in a prototype and builds on the emerging technology of graphical processing unit acceleration in combination with physics engines. We propose a new artifact design and summarize the how-to knowledge in the form of abstracted design principles. Our results demonstrate an improvement in terms of performance depending on the underlying hardware. We develop a conceptual model to assist future research in choosing a solution technology

A GPU-Computing Approach to Solar Stokes Profile Inversion

We present a new computational approach to the inversion of solar photospheric Stokes polarization profiles, under the Milne-Eddington model, for vector magnetography. Our code, named GENESIS (GENEtic Stokes Inversion Strategy), employs multi-threaded parallel-processing techniques to harness the computing power of graphics processing units GPUs, along with algorithms designed to exploit the inherent parallelism of the Stokes inversion problem. Using a genetic algorithm (GA) engineered specifically for use with a GPU, we produce full-disc maps of the photospheric vector magnetic field from polarized spectral line observations recorded by the Synoptic Optical Long-term Investigations of the Sun (SOLIS) Vector Spectromagnetograph (VSM) instrument. We show the advantages of pairing a population-parallel genetic algorithm with data-parallel GPU-computing techniques, and present an overview of the Stokes inversion problem, including a description of our adaptation to the GPU-computing paradigm. Full-disc vector magnetograms derived by this method are shown, using SOLIS/VSM data observed on 2008 March 28 at 15:45 UT