Parallel Computing Applied to Satellite Images Processing for Solar Resource Estimates

This article presents the application of parallel computing techniques to process satellite imagery information for solar resource estimates. A distributed memory parallel algorithm is introduced, which is capable to generate the required inputs from visible channel images to feed a statistical solar irradiation model. The parallelization strategy consists in distributing the images within the available processors, and so, every image is accessed only by one process. The experimental analysis demonstrate that a maximum speedup value of 2.32 is achieved when using four computing resources, but beyond that point the performance rather decrease due to hard-disk input/output velocity.