Efficient backprojection-based synthetic aperture radar computation with many-core processors

  • Authors:
  • Jongsoo Park;Ping Tak Peter Tang;Mikhail Smelyanskiy;Daehyun Kim;Thomas Benson

  • Affiliations:
  • Intel Corporation;Intel Corporation;Intel Corporation;Intel Corporation;Georgia Tech Research Institute

  • Venue:
  • SC '12 Proceedings of the International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Tackling computationally challenging problems with high efficiency often requires the combination of algorithmic innovation, advanced architecture, and thorough exploitation of parallelism. We demonstrate this synergy through synthetic aperture radar (SAR) via backprojection, an image reconstruction method that can require hundreds of TFLOPS. Computation cost is significantly reduced by our new algorithm of approximate strength reduction; data movement cost is economized by software locality optimizations facilitated by advanced architecture support; parallelism is fully harnessed in various patterns and granularities. We deliver over 35 billion backprojections per second throughput per compute node on an Intel® Xeon® E5-2670-based cluster, equipped with Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessors. This corresponds to processing a 3K x 3K image within a second using a single node. Our study can be extended to other settings: backprojection is applicable elsewhere including medical imaging, approximate strength reduction is a general code transformation technique, and many-core processors are emerging as a solution to energy-efficient computing.