GPGPU Acceleration of Incoherent Scatter Radar Plasma Line Analysis

The incoherent scatter radar (ISR) technique is a powerful remote sensing tool for ionosphere and thermosphere dynamics in the near-Earth space environment. Weak ISR scatter from naturally occurring Langmuir oscillations, or plasma lines, contain high precision information on the altitude-dependent thermal ionospheric electron density. However, analyzing this frequency-dependent scatter over a large number of radar ranges requires large computational power, especially when the goal is realtime analysis. General purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) offers immense computational speedup when compared to traditional central processing unit (CPU) calculations for highly parallelizable tasks, and it is well suited for ISR analysis applications. This paper extends a single graphics processing unit (GPU) algorithmic solution in a GPGPU framework, and discusses the algorithm developed, including GPU hardware considerations. Results indicate an order-of-magnitude improvement over CPU analysis and suggest that GPGPU can achieve realtime speed for plasma line applications.