Abstract:

Realtime Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging techniques have been attracting many interests in military and
remote sensing fields. SAR imaging algorithm features massive data and computation, which
presents a huge demand for high performance computing, and thus it is suitable for using a
representative high performance architecture, such as the cluster platform, to accelerate SAR
imaging programs. For the cluster system with distributed memory, the communication latency is
an allimportant optimization factor to improve the performance of parallel program.
Therefore, based on the cluster platform, the paper studies on the techniques of hiding the
multilevel communication latency for SAR imaging algorithm. Especially, three important
techniques are researched, including thread safety queue, nonblocking communication, and
multithread blocking communication. Moreover, the optimal communication size for hiding
communication latency is achieved. The experimental results show that the SAR imaging program
optimized by hiding communication latency can have high net utilization, and achieve obvious
performance improvement. 

Key words: SAR imaging algorithm;communication latency hiding;thread safety queue;communication block;net utilization