| Sandia began the development of real-time ATR
systems by custom designing high speed hardware for programs such as STARLOS.
As commercially available computing speeds have
increased, it has become possible to design the current generation
of ATR hardware with commercial off the shelf
(COTS) hardware linked together with high speed data buses and networking.
The basic configuration of our real-time ATR shown to the left has 12 PowerPC
300 MHz CPUs and can process imagery at the rate of one Megapixel per second
for 10 targets of interest. This 6U VME rack can accommodate up to 64 CPUs.
Processor boards (4 CPUs each) may be added as needed to meet computational
requirements.
The CPU requirements of our ATR system scale
linearly with respect to pixel rate and number of targets. A full
64 CPU configuration handles data rates of five Megapixels per second for
10 targets of interest or 50 targets of interest at one Megapixel per second
in the same 3.5 ft3 sized ATR system.
Upcoming advances in CPU performance will triple our current
capabilities by the end of the year 2000. |
