Fast and flexible conversion of geohash codes to and from latitude/longitude coordinates

Abstract

Insights extracted from spatial queries in geodatabase systems introduce significant opportunities for business intelligence. However, geodatabases are unable to keep up with the required performance due to the massive (and sky-rocketing) amounts of data generated from embedded location-enabled devices. In this paper, we focus on geographic information systems that make use of geohash, specifically, we tackle the kernel of converting geohash codes to and from longitude/latitude pairs. We present the first hardware implementation of a geohash conversion engine operating at wire speed. The presented geohash converter is further enhanced with runtime flexibility with respect to characteristics of the data it can process, furthermore, the architecture allows the user to compromise on performance when limited by hardware resources (design time flexibility). Experimental results of the geohash conversion engine on a Xilinx XC7K325T FPGA show >13X (end-to-end) speedup compared to optimized industry-grade software running on 16 CPU hardware threads.