A network-attached synthetic aperture radar (SAR) processing peripheral will be designed using state-of-the-art commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) central processing units (CPUs) and general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs). Example designs included in the proposal demonstrate that designs based on COTS GPGPUs are capable of exceeding the 1.5 tera-floating-point-operations-per-second-per-pound (TFLOPS/lb) threshold. A preliminary study indicates that custom designs using COTS GPGPUs could exceed the 3.0 TFLOPS/lb objective. Prototypes will be benchmarked using SAR algorithm implementations that have been optimized to the hardware.
Benefit: High-performance synthetic aperture radar (SAR) processors that meet the required computing capacity at reduced size, weight, and power (SWaP) as compared to the current state-of-the-art SAR processors are of value to all SAR missions. This includes missions in the Department of Defense (DoD), Intelligence Community (IC), and the scientific community. These new processors will become especially attractive for unmanned aerials systems (UAS), which have more stringent SWaP budgets than manned systems.
Keywords: General-Purpose Graphics Processing Units, General-Purpose Graphics Processing Units, synthetic aperture radar
