High fidelity circular array simulation

This paper describes a unique approach to performing high fidelity UHF circular array simulations on a high performance computer (HPC). Traditional airborne surveillance simulations have been limited in either spatial or temporal fidelity due to the expensive software and hardware requirements. Recently, advances have been made which provide the rapid deployment of high fidelity scenarios through a modular visual programming environment on an HPC. Based on the visual programming environment Khoros, the radar analysis simulation tool (RAST-K) is a flexible simulation for quickly prototyping airborne surveillance configurations containing radar system features, point targets, and USGS maps. Additionally, RAST-K has been ported to a Linux cluster to simulate realistic flight scenarios. As these scenarios involve changing characteristics between coherent processing intervals (CPIs), additional interfaces were developed to control platform, target, and environmental attributes, as well as partition the simulations across the resource of processors. This paper will discuss these topics by providing an overview of the RAST-K simulation and its use in the simulation of a circular UHF antenna configuration. After which, the simulation of realistic flight scenarios through the use of the HPC is discussed, alone with relevant results.