<p><em>How GPU tech can help public servants serve the community more efficiently and economically, writes<strong> Vishal Dhupar</strong></em><br><br><br>The ministry of urban development is in full swing to bring Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision for smart cities to reality in 100 locations across India that will be modernized, equipped and administered using adaptive and intelligent technology.<br><br>While Rs 48,000 crore have already been allocated for the development of these Smart Cities, IDC has predicted that India's ICT sector will get a minimum infusion of Rs. 2000 crore to back the mega project. Research also shows widespread interest in development of smart urban centers, with almost one-fifth of cities in Asia Pacific having started collaborative operations to deal withinfrastructural, managerial and environmental problems.<br><br>The concept of Smart Cities means different things to different people. Essentially, a smart city is an urban center with intelligent physical, social, and institutional infrastructure that can be sustained in tandem with economic activity and growth. The infrastructure of such a city will typically be equipped with systems aimed at better management of energy resources, water, transport and traffic, safety and security.<br><br>A report by McKinsey warned that by 2030, about 600 million people will reside in Indian cities. With inadequate planning, the quality of life in urban areas is bound to decline. To deal with rapid urbanization, the master plan for development of smart cities has to account for growth in population, businesses, and therefore, the spurt in public amenities and infrastructure, traffic, carbon footprint, so and so forth. Today’s urban planners need the computing capability to simulate the impact of these gradual changes over time against the assimilated physical data, so that they can tweak their models to allow for growth.<br><br>The first challenge encountered by urban planners is sifting through large volumes of data to make intelligent, informed, accurate and swifter decisions.<br><br>Technology is an enabler for planned urbanisation and the development of all sustainable smart cities.From centralised control systems which provide real-time input on availability of water, electricity, healthcare and education to effective management of traffic, weather prediction, pollution control, disaster management and emergency response – everything in a smart city relies on powerful computing.This is where GPUshave taken the driving seat.<br><br>Graphics processing units (GPUs) are built from ground up to handle tasks in parallel and are optimised for compute-intensive tasks. From oil exploration to cancer research. From Bollywoood Studios to weather modelling. From diamond cutting to helping farmers:GPUs offer superiorcomputing capabilities everywhere. The popular Shazam music-search application uses a GPU to rapidly search and recognise songs from its 27-million track database, in a matter of seconds!<br><br>The same power of GPUs will play a critical role in building and sustaining smart cities. Take the example of disaster recovery and emergency response. When cyclone Hudhud hit Indian coasts, authorities had to track the weather conditions to get the correct assessment of the impact on-ground. For this they had to rely on satellite images.However, processing these images could take hours, if not days. GPUs can not only condense the time taken but also help in providing a better synopsis of the exact situation. Speed and accuracy in such situations can save millions of lives.<br><br><strong>Urban Planning</strong>:As India’s urban areas become ever more densely populated, reducing energy consumption and mitigating air pollution will be critical. However, understanding the complex interactions among green assets, projects, the environment and urban microclimates on citywide scales is a complicated challenge.<br><br>Urban planners are using inexpensive and fast modeling tools that run on GPU technology to create life-size simulations of varied demographic environments. These are interactive and immersive simulations that can be mapped against dynamic changes such as energy consumption or pollutant dispersion within an entire landscape. Armed with visual insight into these changes, planners can anticipate the impact of change to design future-ready models or policies for urbanization that minimize the carbon footprint generated by a city, and locate green infrastructure more strategically. <br><br><strong>Governance:</strong> The services of hundreds of individuals in the local governance and municipal bodies keep a city ticking round the clock. How can GPU tech help these public servants serve the community more efficiently and economically?Many workers in departments such as public works, education, healthcare, or fire brigade are constantly on the move or located in remote areas, and it might be difficult to assemble everyone in one place on short notice. Through GPU-aided delivery of optimized graphics and videos over the Cloud to their workstations or smartphones, local governance bodies can remotely and conveniently train employees. By enabling them to share visual information directly to the workstations or smartphones of employees, public departments can cut down training costs and ramp up their efficiency.<br><br><strong>Surveillance & Security:</strong> Maintaining law & order is a daunting task for many cities that are often ill-equipped to fight the spiraling crime rate. Authorities mostly rely on intelligence gathering and assessment from CCTV systems, satellites, and better surveillance technologies to monitor sensitive locations on a 24x7 basis. The timeliness and accuracy of this is critical. GPUs can help reduce both, the cost and time taken, to convert raw data collected from surveillance and deliver actionable insight in real time.<br><br>For instance, the video feed from a surveillance camerais grainy and has to be matched against a visual database of known offenders. In large crowds, probably only part of an object or a person’s face would be captured by cameras. GPUs accelerate the image processing and change detection power of surveillance systems, helping them analyze even moving images at breakneck speed.<br><br>Implementation of GPU tech is most amenable to the sustainability of smart cities, and many governance and infrastructure related projects can benefit from the technology. Premier research and education institutes such as IITs, top universities, and the Dept. of Space are already using them. The ability of GPUs to transform the vision for urban landscapes is being investigated by engineers and scientists in India, and is likely to attract the attention of top decision makers in government too.<br><br><strong>The author, Vishal Dhupar is Managing Director, South Asia, NVIDIA</strong><br> </p>
