• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.165-172
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• 2016

Morton codes play important roles in many parallel GPU applications for the nearest neighbor (NN) search in huge data and queries with its applications growing. This paper discusses and analyzes the meaning of Tero Karras's 32-bit 'unsigned int' Morton code algorithm for three-dimensional spatial information in $[0,1]^3$ and its geometric implications. Based on this, this paper proposes 64-bit 'unsigned long long' version of Morton code and compares the results in both CPU vs. GPU and 32-bit vs. 64-bit versions. The proposed GPU algorithm runs around 1000 times faster than the CPU version.