MAPPING THE SYNTHETIC-APERTURE RADAR SIGNAL PROCESSOR ON A DISTRIBUTED-MEMORY MIMD ARCHITECTURE

This paper describes the processing of raw data, gathered with a synth etic aperture radar (SAR), by the parallel computer nCUBE 2 to form an electromagnetic image of the sensed scene. The initial goal of our wo rk has been the evaluation of the use of a Distributed-Memory Multiple -Instruction stream Multiple-Data stream (DM-MIMD) parallel computer f or SAR processing, with respect to the use of a conventional monoproce ssor RISC workstation. To meet this goal, a study of some algorithms o f the radix-2(n) class for the one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensiona l (2D) FFTs has been conducted. A good algorithm candidate to be paral lelized and used as kernel component of our SAR processor has been sel ected.