Achievement

The research group led by Kate Cowles (Statistics) and Marc Linderman (Geography) with trainees Danielle Dodgen (Biostatistics) and Juan Cervantes and Alex Sawyer (Statistics) developed a new software package, CARrampsOcl, for analyzing massive environmental datasets. CARrampsOcl is a freely-available, open-source package that runs in the R statistical computing environment. It harnesses the power of graphical processing units (GPUs) to speed computation by up to 50 fold. Based on the open source OpenCL framework, CARrampsOcl can perform its computations on GPUs from both Nvidia and AMD, and potentially on other accelerator hardware. As such, CARrampsOcl is accessible by a much larger community of users than its predecessor, CARramps, which used CUDA routines and ran only on Nvidia GPUs.