Performance and Energy Evaluation of SAR Reconstruction on Intel Knights Landing

Abstract

The reconstruction of nxn-pixel Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery using a Back Projection algorithm incurs O(n2 · m) cost, where n2 is the number of pixels and m is the number of pulses. We have developed parallel algorithms and software for constructing multi-resolution SAR images on many-core architectures. We also develop load balancing algorithms for distributing workload to the available cores, thereby optimizing performance and energy. We evaluate the performance of our algorithms and the resulting energy consumption on an Intel Knights Landing (KNL) processor. We also present a comparison of execution time and energy between KNL, Ivy Bridge and Tesla K40m processors.