RADAR Analysis for Proposed Predator Design

Recently the Predator System Program Office (SPO) wanted to evaluate proposed design changes. The complete evaluation included prediction of performance against a range of enemy threats in multiple roles. A portion of that analysis included synthetic radar cross section (RCS) generation and evaluation. For RCS prediction the team used Xpatch® which is a set of prediction codes and analysis tools that use the shootingand- bouncing ray (SBR) method to predict realistic farfield and near-field radar signatures for threedimensional (3-D) target models. The requirement was for over 15,000 Xpatch runs, with approximately half of those jobs requiring one hour of computer time for an individual run. This substantial computer time requirement was met using DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) resources. This presentation describes how the Xpatch RCS results were produced and provided to the SPO. The presentation includes details of how high-performance