GPU-CA model for large-scale land-use change simulation

Land-use change simulation for large-scale regions (i.e. provincial regions or countries) is very useful for many global studies. Such simulation, however, is affected by computational capability of general computers. This paper proposes a method to implement cellular automata (CA) for land use change simulation based on graphics processing units (GPUs). This method can be applied to large-scale land-use change simulations by combining the latest GPU high-performance computing technology and CA. We carried out the experiments by simulating land-use change processes at a provincial scale. This involves a lot of sophisticated techniques, such as model mapping, and computational procedure of GPU-CA model. This proposed model has been validated by land-use change simulation in Guangdong Province, China. The comparison indicates that the GPU-CA model is faster than traditional CA by 30 times. Such improvement is crucial for land-use change simulations in provincial regions and countries. The outputs of the simulation can be further used to provide information to other global change models.