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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Geography

2009

Series

Department of Geography: Faculty Publications

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Prpl: An Open-Source General-Purpose Parallel Raster Processing Programming Library, Qingfeng Guan Jan 2009

Prpl: An Open-Source General-Purpose Parallel Raster Processing Programming Library, Qingfeng Guan

Department of Geography: Faculty Publications

pRPL is an open-source general-purpose programming library developed by the author to parallelize almost any raster-processing algorithm with any arbitrary neighborhood configuration, and support any data type. This paper introduces the advanced features of pRPL, compares it with other similar programming libraries, and demonstrates the performance of a parallel geographic Cellular Automata (CA) model developed using pRPL with real-world datasets. In conclusion, pRPL effectively reduces the development complexity of parallel programming, and efficiently reduces the computing time.


Pilgrimage Places And Sacred Geometries, Robert Stoddard Jan 2009

Pilgrimage Places And Sacred Geometries, Robert Stoddard

Department of Geography: Faculty Publications

Pilgrimage flows, often involving millions of people, attract the attention of scholars seeking to explain these patterns of movement. A multitude of explanations have been attempted, but none has provided an entirely satisfactory understanding about why certain sites attract worshippers to undertake the sacrifices of pilgrimage. It is recognized that, from the perspective of many religious traditions, Earth space is not homogeneous - that specific places are sacred and different from the surrounding profane land. The reasons certain locations are holy and attract pilgrims from afar have long evoked the geographic question: Why are pilgrimage places distributed as they are? …