General Purpose Computation on a GPU: A Case Study of the Czech Helicopter Emergency Medical Service

Abstract

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are primarily designed and used for solving graphical tasks such as 3D scene rendering or image processing. General purpose computation on GPUs enables the utilization of high computational performance of GPUs to solve complex computational problems. This study deals with an algorithm for finding a possible optimization in the Czech Republic’s Helicopter Emergency Medical Service. The goal is to select the optimal locations of airbases from which it is possible to access maximum of an area of interest in the defined response time which is prescribed by law. The criteria used for the optimization of deployment can be the number of airbases, total covered area, costs or risk probability. The implementation of calculations on an off-the-shelf programmable GPU provides a processing speedup of several orders of magnitude.