Heterogeneous Data Processing in All-Digital Phased Array Radar

All-digital phased array radars are an emerging technology that require new data processing techniques which are scalable, rely on open-architecture software components, and do not create bottlenecks for the real-time operation. Achieving a solution for these issues relies on heterogeneous processing and distributed software development on CPUs and FPGAs, whereby the overarching algorithm processing chain is distributed in a way that begins at the ADC of each element on an array and concludes in actionable data products. An important aspect is not only the speed of the algorithms, but the throughput of the packetized data transfer. These packets are not only routed, but they are also acted upon in a network of computing services. Here, we explore an open-source resource manager, known as Kubernetes, which connects the packetized data with computing resources on the servers, i.e., moving data in and out of server RAM to complete algorithms such as creating range-Doppler maps, as our results section shows.