Ben Cordes will present his MS Thesis on Tuesday April 22, 2008

Title: Parallel Backprojection: A Case Study in High Performance
Reconfigurable Computing

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.