Accelerated Scientific InSAR Processing

Neva Ridge Technologies proposes to develop a suite of software tools for the analysis of SAR and InSAR data, focused on having a robust and adopted capability well in place for scientists by the era of the NASA DESDynI spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) mission. The software will take advantage of the latest technologies associated with graphics processor units (GPUs) to drastically accelerate desktop processing performance. The growth in both GPU hardware performance and software development tools far exceeds those for general CPUs and other computer systems. Our effort will take advantage of this externally driven growth throughout the next decade. Under the proposed paradigm, users will access raw data via the internet using the developed software tool and process this data locally on a desktop computer augmented with an inexpensive GPU system. The local software will be designed for both ease of use and flexibility allowing scientists to produce their particular InSAR products from archived raw data very quickly. The software process flow will be developed by Neva Ridge in conjunction with NASA InSAR scientists, and will be open to supported scientists who would like to add or modify internal algorithms. Neva Ridge will maintain the software in an ongoing support role, and will incorporate the new and updated InSAR algorithms as nominated by scientists. Under this Phase I effort, we will demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by prototyping the main flow of InSAR processing steps using a GPU-accelerated system and will design process flows for many InSAR applications.