The radar satellite TerraSAR-X monitors the Earth's surface in a near-polar orbit. To provide the maritime community with up-to-date information on the presence and location of icebergs, the high-resolution radar images provided by the satellite are processed automatically by an image processing chain. A cell-averaging constant false alarm rate detector is used for iceberg detection, which has proven its usefulness for terrestrial object detection already. However, data transmission and processing require an impractical amount of time for realtime operation. In the present work, an FPGA-based hardware prototype of the detection algorithm is proposed, which accelerates image processing by a factor of ten compared to a software implementation and shows potential for further speed-up in the future.
Many-core architectures integrate a large number of comparatively small processing cores into a single chip. However, the high degree of parallelism increases the run-time resource management complexity and overhead. The employment of dedicated hardware enhancements potentially enables a high quality of the resource management while management overhead is mitigated. To exploit the potential of hardware enhancements, we propose a dedicated infrastructure for run-time resource management on homogeneous MIMD many-core processors. For hardware enhanced resource management, a scalable and cluster-based system architecture is implemented. The resulting architecture (DRACON) utilizes message passing based communication, the dedicated infrastructure and hardware accelerators for resource management. A comprehensive evaluation for DRACON and reference architectures is performed using a transaction level simulation framework and dynamic task management as a use case. As benchmarks, synthetic models and task graph models of real-world applications are applied. The results reveal the limited scalability of classical architectures for resource management on many-cores. It is therefore necessary to apply cluster-based or moderately distributed architectures for many-core resource management. Further, the results demonstrate a significant performance improvement for the DRACON architecture at a number of hundreds of processing cores. Our evaluations show that DRACON generally outperforms software-only run-time management on many-core and achieves a performance improvement of up to 15.21% for single-program and more than 6% for mixed workloads.INDEX TERMS Computer architecture, many-core, dynamic run-time management, dedicated hardware.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.