GPGPU Acceleration using OpenCL for a Spotlight SAR Simulator

Abstract

In this paper, OpenCL is used to target a general purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU) for acceleration of 2 modules used in a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) simulator. Two of the most computationally complex modules, the Back Projection and Generate Return modules, are targeted to an AMD FirePro M5100 GPGPU. The resulting speedup is 3X over multi-threaded C++ implementations of those algorithms running on an 4-core Intel I7 2.8GHz processor, 4X and 7X over single-threaded C++ implementations, and 19X and 29X over native MATLAB implementations, respectively.