GPU-Accelerated Computation of Time-Evolving Electromagnetic Backscattering Field From Large Dynamic Sea Surfaces

Abstract

An efficient facet-based composite scattering model (FBCSM) is developed for calculating the time-evolving electromagnetic (EM) scattering field (TESF) to study the normalized radar cross section and Doppler spectrum characteristics from dynamic sea surfaces. The dynamic sea surface comprises two-scale profiles: small-scale capillary ripples modulated by large-scale gravity waves, which are modeled by millions of small facets. In microwave bands, two scattering mechanisms, quasi-specular scattering with respect to gravity waves and Bragg scattering with respect to ripples, are taken into account in the FBCSM for computation of the time-evolving EM scattering field under diverse polarizations. However, it may be very time-consuming and difficult to calculate the TESF due to the high resolution and dynamic complexity of the large dynamic sea surface. In this paper, the NVIDIA Tesla K80 graphics processing unit (GPU) with the compute unified device architecture is utilized to improve the computational performance of the TESF. The whole GPU-based TESF computation includes the optimal use of temporary variables, shared memory, constant memory and register, fast-math compiler options, asynchronous data transfer, and the most suitable block size and number of registers. By utilizing the proposed five improvement strategies, a significant speedup of $1200 \times $ can be achieved for computation of TESF from large dynamic sea surfaces for microwave bands compared with the single-threaded C program executed on the Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3450 CPU.