Advisor(s)
Miriam E. Leeser
Contributor(s)
Eric Miller, Mehdi Tahoori
Date of Award
2008
Date Accepted
4-2008
Degree Grantor
Northeastern University
Degree Level
M.S.
Degree Name
Master of Science
Department or Academic Unit
College of Engineering. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Keywords
High performance reconfigurable computing, Computer engineering, Industrial engineering
Subject Categories
Back propagation (Artificial intelligence)
Disciplines
Engineering
Abstract
High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing (HPRC) is a novel approach to providing the kind of large-scale computing power demanded by modern scientific applications. One of these applications is Backprojection, an image formation algorithm that can be used as part of a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) processing system. Backprojection is an embarassingly parallel application that is ideal for implementation in hardware, especially on reconfigurable computing devices such as FPGAs. This thesis presents an implementation of backprojection for SAR on an HPRC system. It is intended for use in the Swathbuckler project, a joint collaboration of multiple national military research agencies. Using simulated data taken at a variety of ranges, our HPRC implementation of backprojection runs over 200 times faster than a similar software-only program, with an overall application speedup of better than 50x. In addition to excellent single-node performance, the application is easily parallelizable, achieving near-linear speedup when run on multiple nodes of a clustered HPRC system.
Document Type
Master's Thesis
Rights Information
Copyright 2008
Rights Holder
Benjamin Cordes
Permanent URL
Recommended Citation
Cordes, Benjamin, "Parallel backprojection : a case study in high performance reconfigurable computing" (2008). Electrical and Computer Engineering Master's Theses. Paper 16. http://hdl.handle.net/2047/d10017896
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