Hyperspectral processing in graphical processing units

With the advent of the commercial 3D video card in the mid 1990s, we have seen an order of magnitude performance increase with each generation of new video cards. While these cards were designed primarily for visualization and video games, it became apparent after a short while that they could be used for scientific purposes. These Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) are rapidly being incorporated into data processing tasks usually reserved for general purpose computers. It has been found that many image processing problems scale well to modern GPU systems. We have implemented four popular hyperspectral processing algorithms (N-FINDR, linear unmixing, Principal Components, and the RX anomaly detection algorithm). These algorithms show an across the board speedup of at least a factor of 10, with some special cases showing extreme speedups of a hundred times or more.