Parallelized TSM-RT Method for the Fast RCS Prediction of the 3-D Large-Scale Sea Surface by CUDA

In this paper, a parallelized two-scale model-ray tracing (TSM-RT) method is developed for the fast radar cross-section prediction of the 3-D large-scale sea surface by the compute unified device architecture (CUDA). The TSM-RT method is an accelerated RT method, where the sea surface is constructed into a great deal of large triangles, which consist of many small triangles; this is called the two-scale model. For the TSM-RT method, the large triangles are utilized to determine the asymptotical ray paths, while the small triangles are utilized to calculate the scattered far fields. In addition, the CUDA of NVIDIA takes advantage of the graphics processing units (GPUs) for parallel computing, and greatly improves the speed of computation. The scattering field of each ray in the TSM-RT method is calculated independently. Therefore, a parallelization concept, which is based on the CUDA technology, is presented to improve the computational efficiency. The asynchronous transfer and shared memory are used to further improve the speedup factors. Our method is validated by comparing the numerical results with those obtained using a CPU. At the same time, significant speedup factors are achieved compared with the CPU-based TSM-RT.