Improving the performance of parallel backprojection on a reconfigurable supercomputer

ABSTRACT

Reconfigurable supercomputing is a new direction of research in the quest for novel high-performance architectures. A handful of products are available in this field, but no architecture has emerged as the clear winner in performance. Using the US Air Force Research Labs' Heterogeneous High Performance Cluster (HHPC), we have developed a successful reconfigurable supercomputing implementation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image formation using backprojection, a highly parallel algorithm. By studying the architectural features of the HHPC and hand-tuning the application to those features, we estimate that better than 1000x speedup over a single-node software-only solution is feasable. In particular, we consider the movement of data between nodes, the movement of data between host PC and FPGA board, and the use of on-board memories available to the FPGA for data storage. These results indicate that reconfigurable supercomputers are an excellent choice to tackle highly-parallel large-dataset problems.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.5 COMPUTER SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION
      C.5.1 Large and Medium ("Mainframe") Computers
          Subjects: Super (very large) computers

Additional Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.7 INTEGRATED CIRCUITS
      B.7.1 Types and Design Styles
          Subjects: Gate arrays

  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.4 PERFORMANCE OF SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Performance attributes; Design studies

General Terms:
Design, Performance