Hybrid general-purpose computation on GPU (GPGPU) and computer graphics synthetic aperture radar simulation for complex scenes

Abstract

In this paper, a new hybrid general-purpose computation on GPU (GPGPU) and computer graphics synthetic aperture radar (SAR) simulation method for complex scenes is proposed. Previous SAR simulations for complex scenes only use GPU’s graphics capabilities for scattering calculation in graphical electromagnetic computing (GRECO) algorithm. The new hybrid method use GPU’s graphics and parallel computing capabilities for geometry modeling, scattering map and raw data calculation in SAR simulation of complex scenes. The advantages of the new method rely on the three contributions: GPU hardware provides lots of stream processors for threads calculating, common unified device architecture (CUDA) environment runs thousands of threads working in parallel for assigned task, raw data simulation adopts the fine-grained task parallelism. Compared with classical algorithms, the method not only ensures the accuracy of scattering calculation with GRECO algorithm, but also improves the computational efficiency greatlyfor complex scenes consideration. The results show that the method is able to obtain the speedup about 30 times on entry-level GPU. Key words: Synthetic aperture radar (SAR), raw data simulation, parallel processing, general-purpose computation on GPU (GPGPU), computer graphics.