Parallellisering av Sliding Extensive Cancellation Algorithm (ECA-S) för passiv radar med OpenMP

Sammanfattning: Software parallelization has gained increasing interest since the transistor manufacturing of smaller chips within an integrated circuit has begun to stagnate. This has led to the development of new processing units with an increasing number of cores. Parallelization is an optimization technique that allows the user to utilize parallel processes in order to streamline algorithm flows. This study examines the performance benefits that a passive bistatic radar system can obtain by parallelization and code refactorization. The study focuses mainly on investigating the use of parallel instructions within a shared memory model on a Central Processing Unit (CPU) with the use of an application programming interface, namely OpenMP. Quantitative data is collected to compare the runtime of the most central algorithm in the passive radar system, namely the Extensive Cancellation Algorithm (ECA). ECA can be used to suppress unwanted clutter in the surveillance signal, which purpose is to create clear target detections of airborne objects. The algorithm on the other hand is computationally demanding, which has led to the development of faster versions such as the Sliding ECA (ECA-S). Despite the ongoing development, the algorithm is still relatively computationally demanding which can lead to long execution times within the radar system. In this study, a MATLAB implementation of ECA-S is transformed to C in order to take advantage of the fast execution time of the procedural programming language. Parallelism is introduced within the converted algorithm by the use of Intel's thread methodology and then applied within two different operating systems. The study shows that a speedup can be obtained, in the programming language C, by a factor of 24 while still ensuring the correctness of the results. The results also showed that code refactorization of a MATLAB algorithm could result in 73% faster code and that C-MEX implementations are twice as slow as a C-implementation. Finally, the study pointed out that real-time can be achieved for a passive bistatic radar system with the use of the programming language C and by using parallel instructions within a shared memory model on a CPU.