Performance evaluation of parallel delay-and-sum algorithm based on SuperVessel high-performance cloud computing

Delay-and-sum algorithm is a widespread algorithm used in various typical applications, such as medical ultrasound imaging, radar signal emission and reception, antenna directional signal formation, and so on. It is not a typical computationally demanding algorithm, but under new circumstance, for example medical imaging cloud service, its calculation speed should be increased so as to meet the cloud network data communication speed requirements. The conventional cloud infrastructures using central processing units as prime computing resources are not adequate for the fast image formation process. Therefore, SuperVessel cloud with heterogeneous field-programmable gate arrays as accelerators was used as the implementation platform for the parallel delay-and-sum algorithm in this paper. The computing speed of the high-performance SuperVessel heterogeneous implementation is 30 times faster than the computing speed of the algorithm implementation on a central processing unit, including the data transfer time between the central processing unit and the field-programmable gate array.