Through the clouds: Exploring the potential of infrastructure-as-a-service for radar

As Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is used in a variety of applications, we decided to investigate the feasibility of implementing compute-intensive radar processing algorithms on a public IaaS offering, Amazon Web Services's (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). We show that for certain radar applications this approach is more cost effective than individual organisations investing in large and complex computing infrastructure, particularly because small organisation infrastructure is often grossly underutilised. By means of example, we hope to motivate other users to consider a cloud computing approach.