Leveraging the usage of GPUs in SAR processing for the NISAR mission

The NASA ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission will redefine the future of earth science in terms of both the quality as well as the quantity of data that will be downlinked daily. The current software architecture used to process this data is the InSAR Scientific Computing Environment (ISCE), a powerful and modular platform that applies a combination of novel and legacy processing modules to many sources of SAR data. Until recently, this architecture could process most images in a reasonable amount of time; however in the case of the NISAR mission (where the daily influx as well as the size of the images themselves are significantly larger) the current architecture can take hours to process even a single image. This paper explores new efforts to use a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to accelerate one of the processing modules to achieve unprecedented runtimes with no loss in precision, potentially setting a new standard in radar processing in the world of “Big Data”.