Design and performance evaluation of a portable parallel library for space-time adaptive processing

Abstract

AbstractÐSpace-time adaptive processing (STAP) refers to a class of methods for detecting targets using an array of sensors. Various STAP methods use similar operations on different data or in different orders. We have developed a portable, parallel library of subroutines for prototyping STAP methods. The subroutines work on the IBM SP2 and the Intel Paragon under three different operating systems and three different communication libraries, and can also be configured for other systems. We provide executiontime models for predicting the performance of each subroutine. Using the library routines, we created a parallel version of elementspace pre-Doppler processing, three parallel versions of higher-order post-Doppler processing, and two versions of PRI-staggered post-Doppler processing. We implemented a fourth version of higher-order post-Doppler processing, the hybrid method, which uses a combination of fine-grain and coarse-grain parallelism to reduce execution time. The hybrid method can be used to improve performance when a large number of processors is available. Our execution time models generally predict the best method and predict execution times to within 10 percent or better for large test cases.

Gemini: an optical interconnection network for parallel processing

“…Thus, while communication is occurring to/from one memory, computation can take place out of the other memory. This approach is effective for pipelined applications (like STAP), where consecutive data frames alternately require computation and communications [16].…”