Parallel processing techniques for the processing of synthetic aperture radar data on FPGAs

William Chapman, Sanjay Ranka, Sartaj Sahni, Mark Schmalz, Uttam K. Majumder
2010 The 10th IEEE International Symposium on Signal Processing and Information Technology  
This paper presents a design for parallel processing of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data using one or more Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Our design supports realtime reconstruction of a two-dimensional image from a matrix of echo pulses and their corresponding response values. Key to our design is a dual partitioning scheme that divides the output image into tiles and divides the input matrix into sets of pulses. Pairs comprised of an image tile and a pulse set are distributed to thread
more » ... locks in a GPU, thus facilitating parallel computation. Memory access latency is masked by the GPU's low-latency thread scheduling. Our performance analysis quantifies latency as a function of the input and output parameters. Experimental results were generated with an nVidia Tesla C1060 GPU having maximum throughput of 972 Gflop/s. Our design achieves peak throughput of 136 Gflop/s, which scales well for output image sizes from 512 x 512 pixels to 2,048 x 2,048 pixels. Higher throughput can be obtained by distributing the pulse matrix across multiple GPUs and combining the results at a host device.
doi:10.1109/isspit.2010.5711769 dblp:conf/isspit/ChapmanRSSM10 fatcat:a6rnfr4ayzcgraslmqv2bq5djq