To test increasingly advanced radar seeker capabilities to detect high-speed vehicles including the hypersonic vehicles, the resolution of the simulated RF scenes should be increased significantly from its current limit of 400k scatters to 1 million or above and US Navy is seeking a software simulation solution with novel algorithms and a scalable computational pipeline to achieve the stated goal of the equivalent of 1 million scatterers in the target scene at 10,000 Hz. We are proposing to enhance our existing SAR simulator code "QRay-SAR" which utilizes the massively parallel GPU Ray tracing solutions for Real-Time HWIL SAR Simulation. Our proposed approach seeks to overcome the stringent timing constraints of simulating HWIL SAR backscatter simulation at 10kHz using state-of-the-art COTS GPU computing hardware and specialized computing software. Our proposed solution will a) integrate Hardware Accelerated Ray Tracing GPUs using Nvidia Optix RayTracing engine and b) utilize Nvidia Direct GPU to GPU and Host Data Transfer techniques and c) communicate with the HWIL using special kernel programs to ensure the HWIL will receive the rendered output with minimal latency. The entire solution is architected in a powerful computational pipeline by keeping an open and flexible architecture and we will utilize opensource code as much as possible. Our system will be designed to operate in two modes: (1) Discrete Backscatter Mode; backscatter is simulated from 1M point sources (with optional background sources), and (2) Continuous Backscatter Mode; backscatter is simulated from a continuous 3D scene model.
