Acceleration of synthetic aperture radar for on-board space systems

There is an increasing trend in modern space systems to move processing that until now was transmitted to ground for processing, on board the satellite. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is an example of such processing. However, such a computationally intensive task requires high performance hardware. In this paper we present the CPU and GPU acceleration of an on-board SAR processing application, part of ESA's open source benchmarking suite OBPMark. We benchmark several embedded multicore and GPU platforms which are promising candidates for future on-board systems. Our results show that both embedded multicores and especially GPUs can provide significant speedups in this type of processing, and can achieve performance levels similar to the ones of high performance ground stations.
This work was supported by ESA through the 4000136514/21/NL/GLC/my co-funded PhD activity ”Mixed Software/Hardware-based Fault-tolerance Techniques for Complex COTS System-on-Chip in Radiation Environments” and the GPU4S (GPU for Space) ESA-funded project. Moreover, it was supported by the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme under the METASAT project (grant agreement 101082622). It was also partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under grants PID2019-107255GBC21 and IJC-2020-045931-I ( Spanish State Research Agency / Agencia Espanola de Investigación (AEI) / http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100011033 ) and by the Department of Research and Universities of the Government of Catalonia with a grant to the CAOS Research Group (Code: 2021 SGR 00637).
Peer Reviewed
Postprint (author's final draft)