GPU-Accelerated High-Bandwidth Radar Centroiding

Abstract

Radar signal processing is a computationally inten-sive task, especially for high-bandwidth systems. Traditionally, such systems have relied on the interleaving of processing on multiple nodes of large compute clusters to achieve the necessary throughput. Development in general-purpose GPU computing has led to a massive increase in the computational power available to highly parallel tasks. Most parts of the radar signal processing pipeline are well suited for such a task. This paper describes an algorithm for centroiding, a key part of the search radar pipeline that has not yet been demonstrated on a GPU. With this centroiding algorithm, the entire high-data-rate portion of the processing pipeline can be run on the GPU, yielding a speedup factor of approximately 40. The primary benefit of this approach is a massive reduction in data copying from the GPU to the CPU-a factor of over 1200 in this case-alleviating the main barrier to G PU - based radar processing systems.