Synthetic aperture radar processing facility based on a parallel supercomputer

A high-performance processing facility for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is described. The SAR processor is designed for the ERS-1 remote sensing satellite and will process a 100-km by 100-km scene in less than eight minutes. This is three times the throughput of comparable facilities. The SAR processor is built around a 320-MFLOP parallel processor. The front-end processor is a superminicomputer, which provides the input/output capacity necessary to avoid idle time in the parallel processor, and more than 1-Gbyte storage. The design of hardware and software for the front-end processor is given as well as a brief description of the parallel processor. The output products and processing algorithms are also given along with system design philosophy