Deployment of SAR and GMTI Signal Processing on a Boeing 707 Aircraft Using pMatlab and a Bladed Linux Cluster
Abstract
The Lincoln Multifunction Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Testbed (LiMIT) is an airborne research laboratory for development, testing, and evaluation of sensors and processing algorithms. During flight tests it is desirable to process the sensor data to validate the sensors and to provide targets and images for use in other on-board applications. Matlab is used for this processing because of the rapidly changing nature of the algorithms, but requires hours to process the required data on a single workstation. The pMatlab and MatlabMPI libraries allow these algorithms to be parallelized quickly without porting the code to a new language. The availability of inexpensive bladed Linux clusters provides the necessary parallel hardware in a reasonable form factor. We have integrated pMatlab and a 28 processor IBM Blade system to implement Ground Moving Target Indicator (GMTI) processing and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) processing on board the LiMIT Boeing 707 aircraft. GMTI processing uses a simple round robin approach and is able to achieve a speedup of 18x. SAR processing uses a more complex data parallel approach, which involves multiple "corner turns" and is able to achieve a speedup of 12x. In each case, the required detections and images are produced in under five minutes (as opposed to one hour), which is sufficient for in-flight action to be taken.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 28, 2004
- Accession Number
- ADA433396
Entities
People
- Albert Reuther
- Andrew Mccabe
- Andrew Rhoades
- Bipin Mathew
- Dan Rabinkin
- Hahn Kim
- Jeremy Kepner
- Lou Tella
- Michael J Moore
- Nadya Travinin
- Tim Currie
Organizations
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology