Abstract:Radiative Transfer Equations(RTE) of water body are complex integro-differential equations, which can be solved by different numerical methods, e.g., Monte Carlo ray tracing, invariant imbedding, and discrete ordinates. Monte Carlo method is a powerful technique, which can be used in any water body, even those whose boundary conditions and inherent optical properties(IOPs) vary in three dimensions. However, the Monte Carlo method is computationally costly, which limits the use for many problems in optical oceanography. In this paper, a new kind of acceleration technology to accelerate the ocean radiative transfer simulation, using the CUDA-enabled graphics processing unit(GPU) is presented. With the approach's help, it is easy to code on NVIDIA GPUs and there is no need to worry about the hardware details of a specific GPU. Firstly, some basic ideas of ocean radiative Monte Carlo simulation are introduced, then GPU programs for ocean radiative transfer simulation are implemented. Finally, the performances of the two GPUs(NVIDIA GTX 670 GPU and NVIDIA Quadro 6000 GPU) with their CPU counterparts are compared. From our numerical results, the speedup over hundreds of times for solving the issues is achieved compared with that obtained using CPU.