Enhanced SAR Imaging Algorithm Development for Streaming Processors

In the past few years, parallel processing has been the driving force behind improving performance. Instead of faster clocked processors, new generations of Intel or AMD processors provide more parallelism. Likewise, graphics processors also rely on a network of multiple cores or parallelism to accelerate computations involved in rendering graphics. This research examines the application of general purpose processing on graphics processors. The development process and programming effort of translating a side lobe minimization imaging algorithm to a graphics processing units (GPU) are considered for analysis. The purpose is to acquire a sufficient amount of experience and data to determine the feasibility of deploying a graphics card-complemented system for tactical and high performance computations.