Real-Time Implementation of Synthetic Aperture Sonar Imaging on High Performance Clusters

A flexible and scalable architecture that implements real-time synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) imaging on high performance clusters (HPCs) is introduced in this paper. Combing HPCs with application of a hybrid MPI and OpenMP parallel programming model, the lookup table algorithm for SAS image reconstruction based on the time-domain correlation algorithm is realized in parallel. Considering the huge computation load of the lookup table algorithm, the pulse-compressed data is partitioned into strips along the range direction which are distributed to the nodes of HPCs. The scalability allows the lookup table imaging cluster nodes to be added or removed without needing to recompile the existing software, and automatic burden balancing is considered. The result of lake trial verifies that this parallel algorithm on HPCs can provide good quality images and meantime have highly real time rate.