Parallel processing methods in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are traditionally used to accelerate the calculation of large data volumes with sophisticated spatial algorithms. Such kinds of acceleration can also be applied to provide real-time GIS applications to improve the responsiveness of user interactions with the data. This paper presents a method to enable this approach for Web GIS applications. It uses the JavaScript 3D graphics API (WebGL) to perform client-side parallel real-time computations of 2D or 2.5D spatial raster algorithms on the graphics card. The potential of this approach is evaluated using an example implementation of a hillshade algorithm. Performance comparisons of parallel and sequential computations reveal acceleration factors between 25 and 100, mainly depending on mobile or desktop environments.
An 11M-triangles/sec 3D Graphics Clipping Engine for Triangle Primitives
