Investigating the use of GPU-accelerated nodes for SAR image formation

The computation of an electromagnetic reflectivity image from a set of radar returns is a computationally intensive process. Therefore, the use of high performance computing is required to form images from radar signals in a short time frame. This paper explores the use of distributed memory cluster computers and accelerator technologies such as GPUs for radar signal analysis applications, particularly backprojection image formation. We obtain good results with the use of GPUs and compare their performance in terms of execution time with distributed memory cluster computers. When using a configuration with 4 GPUaccelerated nodes, for a 4096x4096 pixel image we achieve over 109x speedup compared to a single-node CPU implementation.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CLUSTER
• Authors: Timothy D. R. Hartley, Ahmed Fasih, Charles A. Berdanier, Füsun Özgüner, Ümit V. Çatalyürek
• Keywords: CLUSTER 2009, Cluster Computing, Distributed Memory Cluster, Memory Cluster Computers, Radar Signal